- If I ran Nintendo today, I'd probably put out 5,000 pieces
of creative content starring Zelda and Mario
and build up the IP and make sure all those characters
and all those visions would be winning
on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.
I would just produce at scale.
This has now become singularly a making game.
Make.
Make, make, make.
(yells)
You got your perspective.
(engine whirring)
(audience cheers)
I just want to be happy.
Don't you want to be happy?
(jazzy music)
- [Male Audience Member] If you were to give a percentage
of your work, life and home-life balance, what would it be?
Do you think the balance is important
to being successful in your overall day to day?
- Yes.
But I also think that balance ebbs and flows.
So, I'm probably spending more time on my life
right now than ever.
I mean, look.
People look at things funny.
Between being fully, all-in on weekends,
between five other weeks of vacation during the year,
you're already at a place where you're talking about
you only work 225, of the 360,
you know like, people are very funny
about how they think about work-life balance.
I think that for me, somebody who enjoys work,
between those vacations and weekends,
and now my kids are getting older so now it is,
go to a soccer match in the middle of the day
which is super foreign to me.
I used to be nine a.m., midnight, every minute, boom.
So, but again I think it's similar
to not judging myself that somebody's upset this morning.
You can only do your best.
And I think one of the biggest weaknesses in our society
is that people beat themselves up at every, single second
instead of looking at it in a year's worth,
or a life's work, or at least a month's work.
And so I think balance is important,
I also think everybody here has different balance.
Some people think nine to five is balanced.
I would hate my life if I worked nine to five.
It's just too much downtime for me.
I enjoy what I do too much.
So you get to define balance.
You get to judge yourself.
And people literally take the opinions of their parents
and friends into how they parent or work-life balance.
That is so laughable.
Too much peer pressure.
Too much judgment.
(crunches)
- [Male Audience Member] So in terms
of where you see advertising,
and maybe not even just digital,
where would you see advertise going in five, 10 years?
- I have no idea.
A hypothesis I have, definitely,
is Voice is gonna be a player.
I definitely believe that the new interface
that's brewing is Voice and its impact will be as large
as the mobile device when at scale.
15, 17 years from now.
I'm not, you know I get a lot of credit
because of the way I invested
and all the documentation of being right a lot.
But what I try to remind people is,
when I was saying those things, it had already happened.
I'm not predicting TikTok, it has 1.5 billion downloads.
The fuck kind of guess is that?
(audience laughs)
It's just that people love to say "no" about today.
Let alone the future.
I'm not worried about AR, Blockchain, you know, ML, VR.
All that's coming.
I'm watching all of it.
But no real people use it yet.
And so people love to jump the gun
on technology advancements ahead of the consumer behavior.
I am blindly a day trader of this second.
Before I worry about how to get my AR capabilities down,
why not maximize the shit out of today?
Right this second?
LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, grossly under-priced.
- And advertising's always been the leading edge of culture.
So AR has to, and VR has to begin to weave its way in,
and as advertising agencies,
do we have to be at the forefront on that?
- In a practical way.
The reason I've been able to do that
is 'cause I'm willing to make less money.
Not super complicated, back to CFO.
CFO walks in says,
"I want to shut down the Voice department."
I'm like, "Then shut down the whole company."
He's like, "But it's not profitable."
I'm like, "I'm aware."
That's the punchline.
The reason most agencies aren't able to pull it off
is because they don't want to give up the margin that year.
You're not gonna have clients often pay to subsidize,
those new advancements.
But I think the key is to not be too far in advance.
So we do have people flirting with AR and VR
and things of that nature, but it is flirting.
Because it's just not close.
I don't think people realize how not close VR is.
I don't know a single person that knows a single person
that spends an hour a day in a VR environment.
Every person spends seven hours a day on a phone.
I'm talking about a real delta.
So, yeah.
To me it's the speed in adjusting
to what the consumer's done.
What I'm proud of is,
as soon as Musically gets bought by TikTok,
they relaunch, stuff starts happening.
Our ability at Vayner to be a creative on that depart,
in that world within moments of it becoming real,
that's the strength more than predicting.
It's the speed in which you can execute in today
versus the variable of being right about tomorrow.
- [Host] We talked a little bit
before the live stream started about how you've scaled
your company and just from a cultural standpoint,
but also from a process standpoint,
from an accountability standpoint.
Could you speak that a little bit?
- Yeah, it's a human game.
You know, from a cultural standpoint,
from a process standpoint,
it's just judging the judgers at my level.
I think people are very naive on how much the variable
of success is predicated on the CEO.
She or he has a whole lot of say.
They're the judge and the jury.
A CEO is basically the Supreme Court.
It's pretty final.
These are dictatorships.
Obviously there's boards in some companies
that may have a little juice,
but the reality is that the way we've done it
is by actually caring about it.
It's not super complicated.
I would, we're far more advanced on culture than process.
I hate process so much that I don't look at it often
and any time I do look at it,
it look like it's going really poorly
and so then I just cry and go to sleep.
(laughs)
And so.
- You have a Chief Heart Officer.
- We do.
- Do you have a Chief Process Officer?
- We don't.
And I think that there's a couple reasons.
And we won't.
I believe that human beings that work in companies
are disproportionately obsessed with process.
And I think the second you start putting the process
in front of the output you lose
and I think almost every company
puts the process in front of the output.
I'd rather the process be murky and breakable
than put on a pedestal.
It's a tricky one. - It is.
- It's a tricky one but if you listen to what I just said,
what you'll learn is it will come down to casting.
And if you work on culture
and people aren't political with each other and jerks,
they'll figure it out much easier and with less friction
but the reality is most agencies have too much process
and way too much insecurity in politics
and thus it's slow and clunky and crappy.
- [Female Audience Member] Are you saying that
data privacy regulations are ready to handle
a world in which everything is
AI that we do?
- So I think, I think.
I'll answer the second one first.
It's about data privacy regulations can handle a world
where AI, where every, single product is smart,
at scale, two decades from now,
which is the assumption or guess that I have right now.
No, but I think there's a much bigger conversation
around data privacy that's not being had,
which is, I actually don't think people care
about the privacy.
I think there's a much more thoughtful conversation going on
that will eventually play out,
which is, I'm gonna predict
that it's gonna go the other way.
I would prefer that every technology
knew everything about me.
I mean it.
Unless you kill my children or steal my money,
I prefer you know everything.
This notion of privacy.
What privacy are we actually talking about?
What websites I went on?
My credit card number?
You give away your credit card number every day, everywhere.
Target and the IRS have much bigger breaches than Facebook.
I think there's this fun narrative right now
to demonize technology
because we don't like being accountable.
The Russians didn't make you vote for someone.
You did. (audience laughs)
You decided to believe.
And so this huge lack of accountability will play out.
So, I'm not.
You know, look.
If somebody is creeped out
that the refrigerator reordered their milk,
'cause the milk spoke to the frigerator
and it said, "We have one pour left,"
they're more than welcome to not.
I keep reminding people, I'm like,
"Don't have a smart phone."
"Gary this all sucks, it's all terrible."
I'm like, "Delete Facebook."
"I did."
I'm like, "But you're on Instagram."
"Yeah, but I like it."
(audience laughs)
I mean.
Look, I think as an agency when you think about
the smartification, you're talking about building.
You're talking about actually being indev.
Which is not a big passion of mine, ironically.
I don't like building the highways,
I like driving them better than anybody else.
So I think when you talk about smartification,
where it's all gonna lead to is brand.
Brand is gonna become the most important thing
because when you're ordering on a voice device,
you better say, "Kleenex" not "tissues."
You'd better say "Nike" not "sneakers."
Because then Amazon or Google are gonna pick for you, right.
Same thing with brand.
Once I put that Pepsi in that fridge,
that fridge is reordering Pepsi,
not me deciding to pick up Coke at an end cap at Walmart.
So, brand.
It's like I can't yell about it enough.
Look at my own behaviors.
The signature, the sonic branding.
Like this is all branding for me.
All my friends call me a sucker for giving away
the 270 page deck the other day.
Not me.
I think about brand.
You feel warmer towards me.
I did something nice for you.
People don't get it.
So, that's how I see, I think privacy's really funny.
I think Europe is a really miss...
Is really misplaying the world.
I think Europe's growing irrelevance has a lot to do
with the defense they have around all this stuff.
When Google and Facebook
and all these other companies don't want to be there,
that's going to be bad, not good.
- [Female Audience Member] How do you,
you're obviously putting out a lot of content
over so many different platforms,
so my question is how do you measure the success of that?
Is it based on purely likes
and as we start to see likes going away.
- Likes will go away only for our insecurities outward,
but we will still see them on the backend.
But keep going, is that?
- [Female Audience Member] Yeah, so I'm wondering
what is your way of measuring?
- My measurement on success is far more qualitative
'cause I'm trying to win on brand.
I'm not trying to sell K-Swiss sneakers.
I know that I sold a thousand pairs yesterday
on this singular, Instagram post,
but that is not where my mind goes on, is that good or bad.
My mind works this way.
When I went to the airport last week
and a seven year old ran up to me and asked for a selfie,
I knew TikTok was working.
So for me it's qualitative.
I know something's working
based on reading the comments at scale.
So for me it's much more the comments themselves.
Not how many comments,
the interpretation of the intent of the comments.
'Cause I'm building brand,
I'm not worried about how many likes and shares it gets.
- [Male Audience Member] So I know that Facebook
has been testing search apps, quite recently.
I think it was rolled out last minute to advertisers,
so I was wondering do you envision a day
where the local advertisers
that Facebook becomes a viable search option
as opposed to Google and Bing?
- I thought so years ago.
But much like I knew Google Plus wasn't gonna work
'cause it wasn't in Google's DNA,
Facebook has not shown to me
that search is inherently in their collective DNA.
I'm shocked that Facebook is not a bigger search player,
given the scale that they had.
Given how great the data could have been.
Not as confident as I used to be.
But that's what's great about everything.
You can reboot anything.
They can hire one great executive from Google
and she could drive it.
There's a whole lot of interesting data
that I'd love to search that's public in Facebook
from a search engine standpoint.
But I do think certain companies have certain DNAs.
- Yeah. - You know?
- [Male Audience Member] Mmm hmm.
I'd like to (inadequate audio) - please.
(audience laughs)
- [Male Audience Member] So this is like,
I know what we talked about earlier
and you kind of did answer it but,
Google just released their cloud gaming platform.
- Yup. - Google Stadia.
- Yup. - Do you envision
basically within the next decade,
we're now seeing gaming ads offered by Google?
- Yes.
Google will absolutely go into dynamic gaming ads.
They just need to have the control of the inventory
so they've got to win the IP game
because if they have to go through Blizzard
or somewhere else, they've got a problem.
Whoever owns the IP wins that game, right.
Otherwise they're gonna have to pay a huge vig
to the game creator to get in there.
And then by nature, the ad won't be inherently native
'cause there'll be a friction
between two different companies,
almost like Creative and Media.
So I think Google.
But I think what people forget
is how big these companies are.
Google could buy one of the top gaming studios in the world.
But yes, I do.
Gaming is.
People are extremely naive
about where gaming is in our society.
East Sports is easily one of the top three sports
in America in 15 years with basketball and soccer
being the other two that have the most upside.
Whereas football is stagnant
even though it's America's passion.
And hockey and baseball continue to decline.
I mean the five best baseball players in America
could walk into this office right now,
and 95% of this audience would not know who they are.
They'd be like, "Those are some good-looking, buff dudes."
(audience laughs)
But they wouldn't know that it's Mike Trout.
And he's the best player.
The best.
And when you're in a place where the,
by the way, not only is Mike Trout
the best player in baseball,
he's probably gonna go down
as one of the best players of all time.
And the fact that half the audience doesn't even know
who that is, is a real big problem for baseball.
And that, by the way, is a good lesson for digital agencies,
and marketers and business people.
That's because baseball took the stance a decade ago
that they would create an organization called BAM
and they would monetize every piece of content
thus every free piece of content on YouTube and social media
was taken down by Major League Baseball.
Plus baseball teams couldn't do their own stuff
nor could players.
It was all controlled at a central level to monetize.
They made a lot of money in the short term,
but they completely killed the brand of the sport.
- [Male Audience Member] Along the lines
of controlling the IP,
I know that you had mentioned Nintendo
and them finally getting to the app game.
- Yes. - If you ran Nintendo,
what would be your next move to win that game?
- If I ran Nintendo today, I'd probably put out 5,000 pieces
of creative content starring Zelda and Mario
and build up the IP and make sure all those characters
and all those visions would be winning
on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.
You have to make sure that Kid Icarus and Megaman
and all these things,
reboot all that nostalgia brands, not just Mario and Zelda.
And then I would innovate for games
within the environments of streaming.
Like there's no reason that Fortnite
couldn't have been predicated on Nintendo characters.
So look at multi-player streaming games.
And I would look at mobile games very heavily for females
because the IP translates extremely well to the female demo.
I would just be contemporary.
I'd probably start 10 original podcasts.
I would just produce at scale.
This has now become singularly a making game.
Make.
Make, make, make.
(audience laughs)
- [Male Audience Member] I think our final question we have
from one of the live streamers, Ed from SAI digital,
is "What will be the biggest impact 5G will make
"in digital marketing out of the gate,
"and five years ahead?"
- Ed, is it?
Ed, I'm not really sure.
The one thing that I really know about 5G.
So, I think it's funny how people think about 5G.
Most people, if they're even aware of it,
are like, "Cool, my phone will be faster."
Meanwhile, this is a transcending technology.
5G will be the reason that autonomous cars become real.
Because the lag time will be zero.
5G is the reason that a surgeon could be woken up
in Brazil tonight because she's the best
in the world at a certain surgery,
and she can VR with 5G
performing surgery on you while you're in New Jersey.
That's amazing.
So the speed in which information moves is so incredible.
I don't remember the exact fact,
but this is not like from four to five.
This is like from four to 40, or four to 400.
I don't remember if it's 10X or 100X.
But it's profound.
So I think that the ability for information to move
with no lag is what is really going to be profound.
Things like, you know, when you start thinking
about technology where the paint is smart.
Some of the things we talked about with the frigerator
and things of that nature are predicated on 5G.
Think about a world where our pavement outside is smart
and because of 5G can speak to our car
and your car actually slightly moves
so you don't hit the puddle going 72 on the turnpike
which mathematically would have meant
you would have lost control enough and predicated
on where all the other cars are positioned to you,
it avoided an accident for you.
(upbeat music)
That's crazy ass shit.
5G.
(upbeat music)