#AskGaryVee Episode 54: Marketing Agencies, Ashton Kutcher, & Hot Cocoa

– [Voiceover] Brendan
asks, “Does VaynerMedia “focus much on winning
awards, and what’s your take “on the ad industry’s obsession
with awards in general?” – Brendan, great question. One that I’ve been talking
about for a long time in these halls and in the industry. I think awards are horsecrap. I don’t even know why I’m
not saying horse (beep), because the reason
agencies want to win them is for two reasons. It allows them to recruit talent and they use it as something
to get more business and what they’re doing is,
they’re putting out work for clients that is actually
trying to get awards versus actually trying to sell something, and that’s my real problem with it. I don’t begrudge the
agencies that focus on it because I understand
their business rationale but for me, it’s a unhealthy culture because it takes your eye off the prize which is actually do
something for business. And for us, you know, we’re
lucky because of our work and because of my personal
brand, to be honest with you, we’ve been able to get
a lot of new business. And now, our work is the
word-of-mouth of our business and two, as you can tell, people know this is the right place to
work, so we don’t focus on it. I understand why people do focus on it. I think it’s an energy sucker away from the thing that matters, which
is you need to sell something. – [Voiceover] Rich asks,
“What advice do you have

“for professors to engage college students “in the classroom? What
about outside of class?” – Rich, I think the biggest
thing for you and any professor out there, or if
you’re asking for somebody is that professors aren’t relevant to a lot of their students
today, more than ever, because the behaviors of
how we act aren’t mapping, meaning so many people have emailed me like, literally because of
this show, emailed me that, “Hey I’m in class right
now, and what my professor’s “talking about makes
no sense, compared to. “I’m listening to your podcast right now “while my professor’s talking
because he or she are so.” And literally professors
in major universities that are putting kids in debt right now are telling them that there
is no ROI in social media, like ludicrous horsecrap,
I’m on this crap kick. Anyway, I think the biggest
thing a professor can do is to be relevant with them. If you’re a professor right
now, and especially if you’re a marketing or comms professor right now, and you’re not jamming
on YikYak and Snapchat and the Insta, then you’re
making a huge mistake because you’re out of
touch with your students. You’re saying dumb shit like,
“Hey kids, hey students, “we’re gonna connect
through modern things like.” It can’t even come out of
my mouth, I’m so disgusted with what’s going on in
universities across this country and so it’s relevance,
there is eye rolling and checking the (beep)
out going on in classrooms all across this country and it’s sad because of the romance of how
professors think it should be versus the reality of what it’s like.

“for teenage bloggers to show brands “that they mean business?” – Tanner, brands don’t care
if you’re 14 or 41 or 4,000.

– Tanova, this is a great question. I personally selected this one. I saw it in my Twitter
stream and sent it to India. Show India, I like when we do that. – Eh. – That’s my favorite part of the show. You know, it’s really funny,
this is a funny question. I burn out once every six or seven years, I hit a real like ugh
spot, like where I wanna just check out and I go to sleep. I actually go home and go to sleep. It hasn’t actually
happened, actually I’m on a real good run right now, I
think the last time I did was when we lost Texas at Wine Library, and couldn’t ship there anymore and we lost like four million in revenue and I was just burnt out
like fighting the fight of like in that world,
and so I just literally went home at like 6 PM and went to sleep. I haven’t done it since then,
and that was like 2002 or 3, so it’s been a little, maybe it’s not even six or seven years but,
when I hit my lowest point, I do two things, I go to sleep immediately and two, I make pretend
that my mom was killed. And I know that’s an intense statement, and you should have just
the collective reaction, but when I burn out from work. (laughs) It’s intense. When I burn out, it means that I’m hurt by whatever’s going on in business and I’m focusing on business
instead of the big picture and I directly put my
brain into a place of what do I really care
about, and the second I do that extreme move,
I’m already in the process of going back upstream and so look, I’m a positive person, I
put things in perspective in a very healthy way, I think and so I don’t tend to burnout that often, but the couple times I’ve hit rock bottom, it’s been sleep and recalibration. – Alright, here’s my real question.

Which social media platform
that is currently an incumbent do you feel will be extinct in five years. In 2020, which social media platform that everybody’s invested in do you think will be extinct? – Thanks for the question, Ashton. So I think the two most
vulnerable platforms are Tumblr and Google Plus,
and I think that because they’re just owned by
big conglomerates, right. You know, for all my concerns
about where Twitter’s going, I feel like Dick Costolo and
team will figure that out and get better. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat
are really in a great spot. The two incumbents, Pinterest
I think is in a great spot. About to sneeze possibly, by the way, as I answer this question. The two incumbents that
I’m most worried about are Google Plus and Tumblr. Tumblr because it’s owned by Yahoo and all those politics
of being independent but still being within
a big holding company, and Google Plus because Google, this is a positive by the way. Google has shown me the enormous ability to cut bait if something’s not working, no matter how big it was. And I just have a funny feeling that they may just come out
in a year or two or three and just say, “We’re cutting it. “We may get back into
this game, we may not “but this execution is not working for us.” I actually am almost willing
to predict that may happen that I can see them
cutting Google Plus out, completely outright in the next 36 months. So those are two incumbents, Ashton, and I appreciate the question. Speaking of which, question of the day.