#AskGaryVee Episode 85: Advertising on Pinterest, Body Language & Peace of Mind

“and they are slowly
letting in biz accounts. “Are you optimistic?” – Jeff, this a great question. We haven’t talked enough about Pinterest on The #AskGaryVee Show, so
I appreciate the question. Good job, India of picking that out. I’m a huge believer in
Pinterest’s product. You might have noticed very
recently that they’ve made it a term of service that you
can’t do affiliate sales. My belief is that means
that they are now going to turn that on for themselves. If you start thinking about
the amount of commerce that goes on, on Pinterest, even if they 5% of every transaction, they could right away be one
of the top five to 10 companies in revenue in the digital space. I’m a big believer in the business, and seeing what’s going on with Faithbox, Willie, the CEO of the
company we’ve incubated at Vayner/RSE, just like $4 in
ad spending on promoted pins. Some of the stuff we’ve
seen at VaynerMedia, the stuff I’m seeing from Wine Library, I’m massively bullish. I actually think that
Pinterest’s ad product, a year from today, let’s
call it 18 months from today, we will recall this video, somebody make a note,
(ding) put it into your calendar
18 months from today. We will make a video
or a piece of content, however we do it in those days, 18 months from now, to talk about this video
where I make this claim, which is that Pinterest’s ad
product is a major competitor to Google AdWords for
e-comm businesses that are digital focused. Enormously passionate about
Pinterest’s ad product and I highly recommend
everybody watching this. If you’re selling something on a dot com, that you get very serious about
understanding what’s going on in the Pinterest environment, bullish would be an understatement. Super bullish, super bull like I’m into it. (laughter)

“Like you, I believe there
is so much to be gained “from social media, but what
do you think we have lost “or are in danger of losing?” – Benjamin, I think this
is a great question. I haven’t given this a lot of
thought because the truth is, I’m such an optimist. The truth is, I think most people default
into cynicism and pessimism, (ding) that I think I allow those
people to do that work for me. But, what I do think about, the one thing that is interesting to me, is I do feel that all of us, especially the ones that decide
to participate in putting out content, which if
you look at the data, may not be at full, full scale
in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, gets bigger as you go down. And as the younger you get, the more you’re really putting out content whether in private form or public form. I think the most
interesting thing is that, I think we’re losing peace of mind. And that’s different than privacy. I think that we all now
know we’re living a life on the record. Whether we decide to put it
out there in selfie form, or if we just happen to be
in the background of somebody doing it. And what that does is it
makes us all kind of be on the record, tense up, right? We’re in PR form. I think a lot of us are
living the PRed version of our lives to the public. It’s always the pictures of
us at concerts and on trips. People do share, you know my Facebook feed is really, basically the extremes, and maybe I’m evolving my answer here. I think we’re losing the middle. Maybe I’ll change my answer because when I think about what’s happening, is everybody’s like, look at me, I’m at a Beyonce concert front row, right? By the way, massively interesting data
that I’m looking at of why people are now going to
public events just to take the selfie to say they were there, which is why concert and sporting events, it’s amazing how social is
making the real world business go up. But then, number two, I see a lot of people on my Facebook feed and my social feeds, sharing their tragedies. Literally, yesterday’s Facebook scroll, which I do occasionally, was literally people announcing
that they’ve become sick or pictures of their daughter
with open heart surgery. Just these real extreme emotions, and then the other things which is like, I’m at Bora Bora and
I’m living the best life and I’m pouring champagne down my throat. The middle is getting
kind of squeezed as we are going to social. Ironically, the middle is peaceful, right? The middle is less tense. The middle is relaxing. The little lacks tension. So, for me, I’m good because I need insanity. Like right now I’m pissed. As you may notice behind me, we’ve opened up a 12th floor. (hip hop music) That’s right, DRock, you’re going to go down there
and film some 12th floor. That hurts me because now the
insanity’s down a little bit, but I recognize that I’m
an anomaly of somebody who needs to blast Weezy songs, at full blast, for a six-hour flight to San
Francisco yesterday to get off and be able to do my thing. I worry about the people
that are more centered or introverted in this
environment where we’re getting suffocated by storytelling
and our public personas, whether we intend to do it or
we become a byproduct of it. So, I think separating our public life to our private life is going to become more and more difficult
and we’re losing that. It was just a hell of a
lot easier back in the day. Ironically, keep it rolling, ironically, I think that’s
where Snapchat’s winning. I think Snapchat is content of the middle. If you think about it, the
shit you put on Snapchat, you’d never make an
Instagram photo, right? It’s just the shit you don’t
care because it goes away. You don’t care about the lighting, it’s almost the closest
thing to real life.

“I’ve been in sales for over
20 years and I’ve excelled at “being able to read
people’s body language. “But how do you do that over the Internet “or on Social Media?” – Todd, first of all, India, you’re crushing this episode, or maybe you VaynerNation,
actually forget you, India, you VaynerNation are
crushing this episode with the questions. The truth is I love this question. I love it because I’m
freaked out by the answer. And look, this falls very
much into bravado and ego, but that’s part of me too. I’ve been blown away by my
ability to make that transition. I too, did everything the way you did. I stood on a floor, I watched, I read. I do it all the time. It’s why I love Q an A, it’s why I love public speaking, it’s why I don’t have a set presentation. I’m reading the room in real time. I’m reading my staff. It’s how I scale my
ability to read at scale. Like walking through the
12th floor and be like, that person’s in trouble. It’s weird, kind of like I don’t
even like talking about it. It’s like a really nice
innate skill that has helped me scale my personality. I, for some reason, feel
those feelings in people’s comments and tweets. Now, maybe it took me a long
time to get the cadence. Of course, there’s been times
where I’ve maybe read into it wrong because context and tone is lost, but I’ve go to tell you, my intuition is if you go
hardcore in trying to do that through Twitter, through
your Facebook comments on your posts, and this is more about me
reading people responding to my stuff so maybe I know where
the North Star starts, but it’s been stunning to me
that exactly what I’ve done in the real world is how I
scaled Twitter, specifically, in being able to read people’s emotions and asking for clarity. Maybe in the real world, my man, we don’t ask for clarity. I won’t say DRock, are you feeling, oh you’re feeling uneasy
about this wine, cool, let’s go in a different direction. Maybe I have to ask that
a little bit more tangibly black and white in a
conversation on digital, but it’s the same effort, same mentality, and the beauty is emojis
and short form and slang have given more context around
the written word online. We, as human beings, are great at communicating. People grossly underestimate our ability to be communicators. Whether drawing on caves
or making smoke signals or radio television, the written word, the Internet, commenting, emojis, we’re talented at this. I’m watching all of us evolve. Very many of us, many of you
who have been romantic about grammar, have finally let it go. All of us are misspelling words on purpose so it auto-corrects, because we value the speed. We’re using emojis, not only 13 year olds
or just people in Asia, now it is a worldwide phenomenon. We’re evolving and we’re great at it, so I look for those cues
and keep trying to evolve and stay ahead of where I
think we’re all evolving to. – Hey Gary, Ryan here
from onproperty.com.au,

just want to say thank you
because your book, Crush It!, allowed me to go out full time on my own. My question is why did you
start a service business, your agency, instead of
starting a media company, which you seem really good at? – Ryan, great question. I mean this is… Can we get like a, Can you make some sort an all time great episode alert thing here? Put it in my hand. (majestic music) This is a great question and it’s a very specific, detailed answer for a couple reasons. One, I’m not sure that I
was aware of how good I was at it five years ago. Two, I had an inkling when
we started VaynerMedia. The first project we worked
on was something called Daily1to10.com and we were doing Facebook
fan pages driving to a Tumblr. So, I was on that kick from the get, but three, the most practical thing was, I knew that speed mattered
and that money mattered, and that scale mattered
and the agency-client service business was very obvious to me as the quickest path to scale and money. Because now we have Vayner Publishing and we’re building out lostlettermen.com, you can check it out, we just bought it, wait for the redesign, but
we’re now staring to get into the media business and we
have the infrastructure and the scale and the skill set. And I have 500 people that
I’ve been able to effect with my thinking. They’ve got to counter that
with their own thinking, but clearly, as a CEO and a
thought leader in a space, I’m sure I’m evolving their
thinking towards a direction that picks up speed. Because the more I agree with them, and they agree with me, the quicker we can be
at what we need to do. So, really, the answer
to your question is, because I’m patient. I thought the right
strategy was to build out an infrastructure that
allowed me to get to it later. Plus, not to mention, media’s evolved enormously
in those five years. And if you look at media
and the upside of media, and the media sites of today, five years ago they were very
predicated on SEO and SEM, something that I never really loved. Now, we’re predicated more on
social sharing and content, something I love more. So, I think that, my intuition, and I’d like to think rightfully so, at the time was, I was not the
perfect player for that time. But my intuition was, there’s
a chance that the market may move into that, if I’m in a certain place
in five years to capture the market’s evolution on
the media side perfectly, then I can win triple. And I think I’m starting to maybe play out and benefit on that bet. So, I was just strategic about it. “What usually prompts you
to walk away or turn down

“What usually prompts you
to walk away or turn down “great opportunities?” – Well, Antoine, I don’t
want to be in the business of saying no to great opportunities. I’d like to think that the
answer to the question is my intuition. I’d like to think my intuition
is allowing me to walk away from bad opportunities that
may look good on paper. You know, I just go with my intuition. Really nothing else. I mean, I’m not an analytical thinker. Right? I’m not going to look
at a whole lot of data. A lot of these big funds
that try to ask me like, well how did I know this
startup was going to be great or why did I think this
was going to be great, it was never predicated
on monthly active users or some sort of other data set. It was me, what I would like
to say is that I like to taste things. It’s me observing and then me counter
punching that observation. I tend to be very, very
all-in on my intuition, and so that’s, you know, that’s kind of how I make the calls. It’s funny the way you asked the question. You asked the question in
what I think is more of a defensive mindset, which is if you breakdown the question, it ends with the real kicker which is, run it one more time for
me, India, how do you– – [India] How do you,
what usually prompts you to walk away from or turn
down or know when to say no to a great opportunity? – To me that never runs through my mind. The thought of saying no
to great opportunities is just not in, I don’t
put those words in that pattern of a sentence. So, that is what I think you
should be thinking about. It sounds to me that you’re
crippled by the miss. I’m not. I just keep having the
at bats and the swings, and I know that I’ll
have more wins than loses and if I pass on something good, so be it. But literally, I mean,
we’ve talked about it on this show before, passing on Uber’s angel round
twice and leaving $300 million dollars on the table. Literally, outside of being
a great story to tell you how I feel, doesn’t
come into my mind ever. Well, maybe once in a blue moon. But, pretty much never, and I think that’s an important thing. And an offensive mindset
versus a defensive mindset, something I want to get
deeper into content team.