Day Trading Attention by Gary Vaynerchuk | Business Audiobook

This is Audible. Harper Business and Harper Audio present Day Trading Attention: How to Actually Build Brand and Sales in the New Social Media World by Gary Vaynerchuk. This is the author.

A note before we begin: don't forget to download the accompanying enhancement PDF from your audiobook provider. It contains QR codes that will link to social media posts discussed in this book, a bibliography, and more, and will be referred to throughout as the enhancement.

This book is dedicated to the 1% that make consumer-centric decisions versus the 99% that make decisions based on boardroom politics.

Author's note. The feedback I'll provide on various pieces of content in this book are the opinions of myself and my team based on our experience. I cannot claim any knowledge of any business's agenda or original intent. I am just using it as an opportunity to paint a clearer picture for all of you.

Introduction. Nathan Apodaca unintentionally made one of the greatest modern advertisements. Nathan, known as Dogface on the internet, was a regular guy working at a potato factory in Idaho when he decided to take his longboard to work one day. As he was cruising down the side of the road on his way to the factory, he pulled out his phone and filmed himself on the front-facing camera. He recorded a short video of himself enjoying the vibes, just lip-syncing the lyrics to a Fleetwood Mac song that he had been playing in the background and taking a sip out of his jug of Ocean Spray cran-raspberry juice.

Nathan didn't think much of it. Eventually, right before he got into work, he casually posted the clip on TikTok. Later that day, he was stunned to see that the video had over 2 million views. It continued to go viral and amassed millions more views, around 90 million views at the time of this audio recording.

Soon after, Nathan's whole life changed. He started getting approached by brands for sponsorship deals. He got interviewed by major media outlets. He later released a song with Snoop Dogg and had an acting debut in a television show. At the time of this recording, he has 7.5 million followers on TikTok, 2.5 million followers on Instagram, and 276,000 subscribers on YouTube.

The video also dramatically impacted Ocean Spray's business. The content made the brand relevant not only to younger audiences that you might think is the platform's core demographic, but also to the 30, 40, and 50-year-olds who consume TikTok at scale today. Their juice was flying off the shelves at retail locations across the US. That's not all. The song Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, which was playing in the background of the video, hit the top of the iTunes charts, even though the song itself was originally released in 1977.

The craziest part: Nathan almost didn't post the video. He said in an interview with Big Boy's Neighborhood, "I was like, man, maybe I shouldn't post it. I looked at it again and I was like, okay, remember what Gary Vee says all the time? Post out content. Let's get it out there. It doesn't matter if I don't think it's good. Somebody out there wants to see it."

I just want to go off script right here for everyone real quick and tell you that, as you can imagine, this makes me feel tremendous. As many of you who are listening to this book know, I'm a big proponent of content, content, content, content, content. We're going to break it down heavy in this book, but this is the first time I want to break out of the reading of the book and just say, first of all, thank you for listening. I'm super hyped to be reading this for you, and I think that this is a book that has a lot of potential. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook was a book that I came out with that I know impacted a lot of you in a lot of ways. This was the follow-up to that book. As a matter of fact, this book originally was called Jab, Jab, Jab, Left Hook. And I'm excited to be here. And I also want to say thank you to Nathan for giving me that shout-out. It's nice to know that the positive impact is helping people. Now, back to the book.

This Ocean Spray story is just one of the many examples that capture what modern advertising looks like. There are countless brands, small businesses, service providers, influencers, and content creators that have seen life-changing sales numbers from content that didn't look like traditional commercials or banner ads. For instance, a hip-hop-themed lip balm named Trapsticks had 75 orders between 2018 and 2020. After a series of overperforming TikTok videos, they went on to sell 50,000 units in 2 years. Similarly, a daughter helped turn her dad's novel into a bestseller more than a decade after its release thanks to a popular video she made. Stories like this are happening around the world every day.

It's not just TikTok either. Small businesses are using YouTube Shorts to rank their videos in search queries to drive leads. Plenty of creators across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter) are using these platforms to build massive communities of their own and even create their own products that rival those of larger brands. As I'm recording this, my team and I are using Facebook Reels to drive signups for winetext.com, a deal-of-the-day wine SMS service associated with my dad's business. By the way, please just go to winetext.com and sign up. And if you do, also email my dad, [email protected]. That's [email protected]. It will absolutely make his day. I can't wait to see him hit me up and tell me about all the emails he's getting. Anyway, back to the book.

If you picked up this book, you probably already know you should be on social media. Compared to October 2009, when my first book, Crush It, came out, there are far fewer people who doubt that social media works. However, only a small percentage of that group truly understands how to use modern advertising platforms to build brand and grow sales in today's rapidly changing environment. This book will give you the blueprint.

Day trading attention and why it matters. In 2013, I wrote Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social Media World. It was a guide on how to communicate on the social media platforms of the day. Given how much the advertising landscape has changed in the 10 years that have since passed, I figured it was time for an updated version. I thought about calling this book Jab, Jab, Jab, Left Hook, a fitting name for the sequel. I eventually decided on Day Trading Attention because it best describes not only what I do for a living but also the number one skill set that you need to master today's advertising landscape: understanding attention — what it is, where it is, where it's underpriced, and how to leverage it for brand building and sales.

This isn't a book about just social media. It's a book about mastering the art and science of storytelling in modern underpriced attention channels. Of course, social media happens to be a huge part of that. But as you'll hear over the course of this book, it can also involve strategies like event marketing, developing collectible products, running ads on streaming services, brand collaborations, influencer partnerships, and potentially even traditional advertising campaigns like TV commercials or billboards in some cases.

Just as a day trader constantly studies financial markets to keep a pulse on what's happening, you must constantly study what people are paying attention to, the cost associated with capturing that attention, and how it shifts by the day. This is how you'll find the best marketing and sales strategies for your business or brand. Think of it this way: if you know what people are paying attention to and where they're paying attention, then you actually have a shot at selling them something. This is what marketers have been doing for generations — identifying where human attention lies and reverse engineering it.

For instance, the radio gets invented, people start listening to it, and marketers realize, "Hey, I can pay money to a radio station so they'll let me pop in while people are listening and I can sell them my stuff. This radio station talks about baseball and people listening are probably baseball fans. So why don't I tie some baseball references into my script so they'll be more interested in listening to me?" Same thing with television. The TV is invented, shows are created, people start watching, and marketers realize, "Hey, I can show up while people are watching and show them why my company has the best laundry detergent ever."

You can even take the concept back to the Stone Age. I bet if somebody wanted to sell you a new club, they would draw on the cave walls because that's where the cavemen were most likely to look. Attention is the game. More specifically, underpriced attention is the opportunity. To understand what that means, think of attention as an asset. It's like buying real estate. 50 years ago, if you believed that Malibu was going to grow in popularity and home prices would go up, you would have first studied all the technical nuances of buying beachfront property in that area, and then you would have bought as much as you possibly could before prices started rising even further.

Similarly, when an advertising platform has a lot of eyes and ears on it, the cost of storytelling on that platform is relatively low. That's when you need to go all in. Just like certain cities have underpriced real estate, certain advertising platforms have underpriced attention. That being said, underpriced attention isn't just about what advertising medium is the cheapest. It's about whether you can get a low cost relative to the amount of actual attention you get. Let me explain.

In the 1950s, one of the mediums with underpriced consumer attention happened to be television. According to some estimates, 90% of American households had a television set by 1960. And unlike today, people actually watched television commercials back then. Some brands realized this early on and aggressively launched TV strategies with mascots, taglines, and catchy jingles. In the 1950s, brands were also able to have creative control over producing shows on TV, which led to programs like Hallmark Hall of Fame and the Colgate Comedy Hour. Roy Disney, Walt Disney's older brother, even made a catchy jingle out of the slogan "I Like Ike," which was then run as TV commercials, eventually contributing to Dwight D. Eisenhower winning the 1952 presidential election. The proof was clear there: television held a vast majority of underpriced consumer attention.

As the years passed and technology began to evolve, however, the attention shifted. The number of consumers watching traditional cable television today is drastically declining. The 2022 coverage of the Winter Olympics drew the lowest ratings in the event's history on NBC. According to some studies, top cable providers had a net loss of 3.5 million video subscribers in 2022.

With other mediums like social media and streaming platforms creating more competition for consumer attention, advertising on television just isn't what it used to be in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, or 80s. But still, the cost of television commercials is upward of $100,000 in many cases. The price hasn't adjusted much for the decline in attention over the years. What does this mean? While television commercials can still quote-unquote work, they are generally overpriced.

Sure, if you're spending $100,000 on a commercial, you'll get to sell some stuff. But what if you allocated the same $100,000 on a well-executed modern advertising strategy grounded in social media? Would you sell even more? More interestingly, could you extract insights from your social media campaigns to help you make even better commercials should you even decide to run them? By no means am I telling brands to never run another television ad again. In fact, even though traditional television commercials are overpriced as a whole, there is one major exception: Super Bowl commercials.

I believe the Super Bowl commercial is the single greatest deal in advertising in the US. Even at $7 million for a 30-second spot as I'm recording this in 2023, 115 million people watched the most recent Super Bowl in the United States. And by the way, that was the one in 2023. The 2024 one with Taylor Swift and Kelce action had the biggest ratings of all — I think it was closer to 130 million, but that's just me jumping in to make this a little more updated. It's part of the culture for Americans to sit down and watch those TV ads. That level of consumption is impossible to replicate, even with the best social media strategies. Believe it or not, I think Super Bowl commercials are a bargain. They can really work for brands, assuming the ad is good. We'll get into that later.

Similarly, regular TV commercials can occasionally work if the ad was bought in a very strategic way and the creative was remarkable and well priced. The issue is most of today's television commercials and traditional marketing executions are not Super Bowl ads, nor are they purchased at the appropriate price. So why do so many marketers, brands, and corporations still treat them like religion? It's because people tend to dismiss what's underpriced today and instead focus on what used to work in the past or what might work in the future. In the process, they continue to underestimate what's working right now.

It's why some small business owners and professionals still say TikTok can't generate leads like SEO or LinkedIn doesn't convert as well as Google AdWords. In the 1950s, those same people would have said television commercials don't work as well as radio ads, and they would have been wrong. In the early 2000s, those people would have said that Google AdWords were a waste of time. In the mid-1990s, when I was running my dad's liquor store, those people told me that having a website was stupid and that I should just open another store for Wine Library. In the late 1990s, they told me email wouldn't replace catalogs. I get it. People always have reactions like this when new technologies come along and change the way we do things.

Still, I wish more businesses and brands understood that they're only hurting themselves by continuing to underestimate modern advertising platforms. They're leaving ridiculous amounts of opportunity on the table, and they don't have to. Let me ask you, marketers, executives: why are you always a no person in the face of new opportunities? Why can't you be a maybe person? Do your homework and then decide if it's yes or no.

Many fast-growing brands today have been built on the back of modern advertising executions. Companies like True Classic and Fashion Nova, to name a couple, not to mention companies built around personal brands such as Chamberlain Coffee, founded by popular YouTuber and creator Emma Chamberlain. I built Wine Library primarily by using underpriced mediums in the 1990s and early 2000s: Google AdWords, email marketing, and organic YouTube videos. Day trading underpriced attention is what has historically worked in advertising.

What does that mean for you? For large companies and brands, it means it's time to think beyond the potential reach that TV commercials, print ads, billboards, or digital programmatic banner ads offer. For small business owners and professionals, it's time to expand beyond the old traditional sales strategies of Google AdWords, SEO, SEM, cold calling, referrals, or going to the chamber of commerce. For creators and influencers, it's time to get more strategic about the content you're putting out instead of posting just to post, and to expand the platforms you're posting on.

I'm not saying you should entirely stop cold calling or whatever is working for you right now. I don't like to think of any marketing or sales method as dead. I just think there's a much smarter way to build a modern cohesive advertising strategy, one that has social media at the core and uses insights from social media campaigns to inform all the other pieces. In fact, I can't wait to make fun of people who are overinvesting in social media in a decade or two.

I'm going to go off script here. This is incredibly important, everyone. The fact that in the next decade or two, there is no doubt in my mind that 68-year-old me is going to be yelling in some sort of VR or video form saying, "Why are you still posting on Instagram? You need to look at VR or AR or something that I can't even imagine that's going to be invented." Day Trading Attention isn't a book that is excited about social media. It's a book that's excited about underpriced opportunities to grow your business. If I wrote this book in 1999, I'd be talking about email, about having a website, or about talking about Google AdWords. So understand the macro premise. All right, back to the book.

Today, mass consumer attention sits across a handful of social media platforms, which happen to have literally zero cost for organic reach — the number of people who will see your content if you just post without running an ad. That's why social media can be one of the best places to capture underpriced attention. For example, Facebook has an estimated 3 billion monthly active users at the time of this recording. Instagram and YouTube each have roughly 2 billion, and LinkedIn has 930 million members.

Influencers promoting your product or service can also be an underpriced strategy, assuming you choose up-and-coming influencers who are relatively low cost. Same applies to event marketing, ads on streaming services, brand collaborations, developing collectible items related to your business, and all other opportunities I'll talk about in this book. But here's the catch: even if you're on social media, even if you're running ads on Hulu instead of cable TV networks, it doesn't mean it'll work for you. You actually have to be good at the execution.

As soon as I sensed that people were paying attention to TikTok, I knew I needed to figure out all the tactics and details on how to storytell within that platform. I needed to figure out how to make videos people want to watch, how to use different creative units — that is, carousels versus standalone images versus videos — what the first few seconds of my video should look like, what trending audio I should use in the background, how to decide when to duet or stitch a video, and more.

Social media is just an empty vessel. You get out of it what you put into it. Without putting in the work to understand these platforms and the psychology of the people using them, you're just creating a bunch of content that no one will ever see. If you make videos for TikTok that no one wants to watch, or spend $100,000 running Facebook ads with content that doesn't captivate people, then social media will be a waste of time and money. If you overpay for an influencer endorsement that doesn't lead to sales, then influencer marketing will be a waste of money and time.

It's how playing basketball could earn you a lot of money in theory, but you have to be a good basketball player to actually achieve that. Just because you're marketing on social media doesn't mean you're good at it. If you're not good at it, it may not work for you. It's important to recognize what advertising mediums are traditionally overpriced versus underpriced, but it's also important to know how to make them work for you given the resources you have available. That's what you'll learn in this book. With the in-depth strategies, frameworks, and tactics in this upcoming narrative, you'll be better equipped than most to advertise and grow your business or brand in the world we currently live in.

The new social media world. Back when I wrote Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, I defined the concept as give, give, give, ask. In other words, make content that gives value to your audience so that you have permission to ask for their business down the road. The jab's free value would set up the right hook, the ask, in the algorithm with how various social media platforms worked back then. Getting high engagement on one of your posts meant the future posts would be more likely to be shown to those individuals who engaged. So it made sense to create a jab that engaged a wider audience so that more people would see and engage with your right hook.

Providing free value was also just a good way to build trust and affinity with your audience so they'd be more receptive to things you ask for down the road. Over the last decade, algorithms across platforms have evolved dramatically. Today, there are far more variables to consider when producing content. For example, what should free value look like now? What should the layout, design, and formatting look like? How do you decide what pieces of content to make? And how can you create a process to make that production sustainable? How should your content change depending on the platform you're posting on? Could a piece of content that builds brand also drive sales at the same time? How can content like Dogface's Ocean Spray video drive so many sales when it doesn't even look like a right hook?

Let's take a step back. As you think about these answers, let's take a step back for a second and start from the most basic advertising question of all: what's the reason that human beings buy certain products and services instead of others? Whether it's through social media or anywhere else, what actually gets someone to buy the latest business software tool or the newest T-shirt or the watch they're wearing? Sometimes it's because the product was at a convenient location, they were able to get it at a cheap price, or maybe a friend recommended it to them. But you'd be surprised how often people subconsciously buy things because the brand or business means something to them. In other words, they decide that a certain product or service is more relevant to their needs or to who they are. That is the power of brand at work.

For example, an accountant got you to trust his or her expertise by posting thoughtful information about taxes online. Maybe a sneaker brand collaborated with your favorite athlete and that made you buy. Maybe a skincare brand made a funny reference to a Netflix series you like, and the next time you were at the mall or drugstore, you picked up their product because you subconsciously felt closer to that brand than their competitors. Maybe a couple of law firm partners created an entertaining podcast about golf, an area you're passionate about, and the next time you had a business contract to get done, you thought of them. Maybe a B2B company created smart content on how their software would save you money, and that made you buy.

Many of our purchasing decisions are influenced by how we consciously or subconsciously feel about a brand. I'll buy virtually anything if an ad has a positive New York Jets reference tied to it. P.S., if you have no idea who I am, I am the biggest diehard Jets fan of all time. What this means is that content alone isn't enough. Content that scales brand relevance is the goal. Relevance is defined as a close connection with the subject you are discussing or a situation you're in. We need to tell stories that help people feel closely connected to our businesses and brands.

It's not just about letting consumers know your business or brand exists. It's not about posting random content just for the sake of posting. If you're a florist, for example, you can't just post a picture of a flower with a "Happy Tuesday" in the caption and call it a day. Relevance is about creating and distributing content that people find meaningful, whether that's potential customers, clients, or other individuals who matter to you. When your business is more relevant, more people consider buying, which then leads to higher sales numbers.

Why did Dogface's Ocean Spray video drive sales? It made the brand more relevant to a variety of different demographics. Whether intentional or not, there was something about that video that struck a chord with people. Maybe it was the camera angle. Maybe it was the length of the video that made it easily consumable. Maybe it was the vibe of the song that was added to the video. Maybe it was the style of the movement in the first few seconds. Maybe it was the light-hearted nature of someone just enjoying life. Or maybe it was a combination of all these elements and more.

The strategy behind how you make content, such as what your first 3 seconds look like, and your understanding of platform nuances, such as what trending audio to use on TikTok versus Instagram, are two of many tools you can use to make content that's more relevant. What is new in the new social media world is that the more relevant your content is to an audience, the more your content will be distributed by the platform itself. As I'll talk about more in part one of this book, all platforms are heading in the direction of showing content to users based on what they're interested in rather than who they're following. The more relevant your content is to an audience, the more likely they will be interested in consuming it, the more reach you will get.

This means that the quality of content that you put out is more important than ever. I don't mean production quality or whether you subjectively like the piece of content or not. I mean you are putting out stuff that a group of people is interested in consuming. For content to be relevant and drive business results, it needs to be more strategic and thoughtful than ever. You need to consider variables like: what time are you posting? What title do you have as a text overlay on your video? Who are you making your piece of content for? Why should they be interested in consuming it? If you post a video on TikTok, how are you tweaking it before you post it on, say, YouTube Shorts? Is your post caption, aka the copy, optimized? What creative units are you using?

Creative units are different content creation features on platforms like stories, carousels, Reels on Instagram, or status updates on Facebook. What creative styles are you using, meaning ways to display content within creative units such as a skit on Instagram Reels? How are you deciding what piece of content to run as a paid ad? Are your profiles on each platform optimized correctly so people know what you do or how to contact you? How can you use insights from social media content to inform larger advertising strategies such as trade shows, TV commercials, or higher production videos, and much, much more? These are the kind of concepts we'll explore in this book.

Before I go into the next chapter, I just want to recap what we just talked about, everyone. It is a tougher game, but the upside's bigger than ever. 10 years ago, it wasn't easy to go viral. You had to spend years building an audience. I spent 5 years, 15 hours a day on Twitter to build my base, and then that gave me the opportunity. It was more like email marketing: get followers and then hit them with content, and a certain percentage would see it.

If you really understood what I was just talking about — the fact that many of you right now are driving, walking the dog, or on a treadmill, and you've been wanting to get more serious about social because you can feel your flower shop or your dentist practice or your car wash is actually starting to decline a little bit, or you're not as hot as you used to be — you know, the reality is that it's actually remarkable. Unlike working out, where if you want to get into better shape right now, you know it's a journey: you start tomorrow and maybe in a year or two you'll start really feeling it.

The fact that many of you, if you really pay attention to this book, for 90% of you it will likely take 6 months or a year of doing this well to start really feeling it, and that's cool. That's the way the world should work. You should earn your way in. But the fact that you can actually post one piece of content that can go viral and can change your business — we don't have that in working out. In working out, I can't have a remarkable workout tomorrow and gain five pounds of muscle and lose 10 pounds of fat at the end. But in social media marketing, you can have that.

It's rare, and I don't want to even seduce all of you with this idea, but it is crazy to me, and it is why my energy is so high on this. The upside is remarkable. An individual post can change your business overnight. Unlikely, one year of everything in this book will definitely change your business to some degree. And so I'm excited about that, even if it stops the bleeding of the decline of your business because you've been marketing and operating so traditionally. All right, let's move on.

The supply and demand of content and why you need to act now. The opportunity is enormous for everyone listening to this. As more platforms are distributing content based on what people are interested in rather than who they follow, it's more practical than ever for creators, businesses, and brands alike to achieve more relevance and grow, even if they don't have an audience just yet. But the reality is the opportunities on platforms today won't last forever. Why? It's a concept I call the supply and demand of content.

When there's a lot of attention on a platform, especially when it's early in its maturity, you have a greater chance to get awareness and engagement on your content because there aren't as many content producers and advertisers on the platform yet. As a platform gets more and more mature, it gets harder to have your content stand out. Between mid-2021 and 2022, my YouTube channel saw some of the greatest spikes in views that I've ever received, largely thanks to the disproportionately high organic reach of YouTube Shorts when they were first released to the public in July of 2021.

At that point, there were fewer content creators on YouTube Shorts compared to the number of people who wanted to watch that type of content. Today, YouTube Shorts is still a huge opportunity for many brands and business owners. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, so posting Shorts and long-form videos with search-engine-optimized titles can help increase the discoverability of your content. However, as more time passes, the more strategy and thoughtfulness it will take to stand out.

The supply and demand of content applies to features and content formats within the platforms, too. For example, in 2015 and 2016, I was getting dozens of emails a day from people saying they made the biggest business development deals in their lives through Instagram direct messages. At that point, some celebrities and executives were more directly reachable through their DMs than any other forms of contact. So reaching out to them with an offer to bring value was more likely to get a response. It's the same reason email marketing worked extraordinarily well in 1999. It was a time when people read all their emails.

Today, Instagram DMs still work for business development, but it's harder than it was in 2015 and 2016. You might have to be more strategic about who you're reaching out to, who you add into the message group, the number of people you reach out to, how established your own profile is, the opening line of your message, and other variables. Same thing with email marketing. It still works today, but you can't get 91% open rates on a 100,000-person email list like I did with winelibrary.com in the late 1990s.

In 2019 and 2020, I was putting out a lot of content about why everyone should be making TikTok content. I was telling everyone that it's more than just kids lip-syncing and dancing. The platform offered enormous opportunities for brand awareness. The in-app content creation features were a relatively new thing back then, and I believe the app was like training wheels for future influencers and content creators. The content creation features made it easier for people to create, and I knew back then that it would pave the way for other apps to integrate similar features.

At the time, the opportunity for organic reach on TikTok was obnoxiously high, and it still is in 2023 and 2024. But today, it takes even better content to stand out, and it's not quite that obnoxious. This has been a recurring theme over the last decade of social. First, there's underpriced attention. And then slowly but surely, people figure out the mismatch between supply and demand. First, it's usually entrepreneurs and creators who move fast and experiment with new platforms without the bureaucracy limiting them on their innovation. Sometime later, small businesses and startups begin to take advantage of the opportunity. Finally, big brands and advertising budgets eventually start flowing in.

Then the supply and demand curve begins to even out. Advertising ends up getting more expensive and organic reach begins to stagnate or decline. There's an especially big opportunity today for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and private-equity-owned brands. With so many Fortune 500 brands in the world continuing to allocate large budgets to outdated forms of advertising, there are still large gaps in supply of content across platforms. The faster you can understand and implement the strategies in this book, the more of an advantage you'll have in the current landscape of advertising.

Although some advertising platforms are more mature than others, don't be confused. There is still a lot of organic reach and attention up for grabs. In my 20s, when I was buying wine terms on Google AdWords for 10 cents a click, I initially thought the opportunity was over once those same words were a dollar. I thought competitors had figured it out. In hindsight, I made a huge mistake. Even a dollar was cheap. Same thing with advertising platforms today. TikTok organic reach might not be as good as it was in 2020. In fact, it's not even close. But there's still an enormous land grab of attention available.

But just like you can't read about doing push-ups and get into shape, you can't just listen about marketing and magically grow your business. If you want to take advantage of all this, you must become a practitioner of day trading attention.

I'm about to go off script right now just based on what I just said. Back to being good at this game. I was stagnant on TikTok for months. Me and my team just didn't have it. I wasn't really putting us in a position to do good TikTok content because I'm busy all day and we're just recording me and I wasn't making for it. However, literally last week, we had three different videos hit millions of views just because our post-production was better. It was understanding how TikTok is right now. And so, like, even as I just read that, my brain was wandering to how real everything I just said is. You know, as hard as this is right now on TikTok and Instagram because they're so popular, they're so big that if you do it well, it will work.

Using exercise, again, one thing I've learned in my journey in the last 10 years is there's a right way to do the exercise, right? If you think of a curl, I've learned that you have to stand still and stand up straight and chest up, right? And I don't move. When I go to an Equinox when I'm traveling, I watch a bunch of muscleheads and others just whip their body because they just want to feel like they're getting 60 lbs up, but they're not doing anything good for themselves. Same here. What I'm trying to do in this book is get you great at social media creative and media spend, not just doing it to check the box of doing it.

The insights and observations I'll share in this book are based on everything that my companies at VaynerX and I have learned over the years. At VaynerMedia, we've learned what successful marketing and advertising looks like for large Fortune 500 brands. Through the Sasha Group, we've helped small businesses grow and drive leads and revenue. Through VaynerCommerce, we've gained insights on scaling e-commerce and direct-to-consumer companies. I continue to hold myself accountable to be a practitioner of everything I write and talk about.

Over the last decade, I've continued to grow the community around the GaryVee personal brand, as well as drive sales for Wine Library using modern marketing strategies. Many of these observations come from my personal interactions with thousands of startups, entrepreneurs, creators, and celebrities through my DMs on social. I've also gathered insights from other companies I co-founded such as Resy and Empathy Wines. Resy sold to American Express in 2019 and Empathy Wines sold to Constellation Brands in 2020. I've learned a lot from the companies I've invested in over the course of my career, including Liquid Death, Slack, Coinbase, Venmo, Uber, Snap, and many more.

Day trading attention is what I do every day, and it's the reason I've had an overall success in marketing over the course of my career of 20-plus years. When I was a kid selling lemonade on Tingley Lane, day trading attention was about figuring out what trees to put signs on based on where the drivers were most likely to look. When I was a teenager doing baseball card shows on the weekends, it was about setting up my display just right to catch the most eyes as people walked by. As a young adult working my dad's liquor store, it was about studying customer movements throughout the store and learning the best ways to display near the cash register for deals.

In my 20s and early 30s, we scaled the business. It was learning how to capture as many emails as possible and knowing how to advertise on Google as more people began to search there. Everything you'll hear me talk about in this book comes from experience because I only talk about things I've lived. As new advertising mediums come out, the attention shifts and the game continues. And this is a game I've been playing for many, many years.

The strategies in this book apply to companies of all sizes. You'll see different examples involving Fortune 1000 brands, influencers, local businesses, B2B companies, nonprofits, executives, direct-to-consumer companies, and more. As you'll get into following the narrative, you'll also learn modern advertising tactics in deep detail. Platforms change rapidly, and it's possible that some of these tactics that work today as I'm recording this will not be relevant by the time you listen to this. However, many other tactics here will be tried and true for the next several years and beyond, and the people who put them into practice will win.

I believe this book will create an enormous number of success stories like Crush It and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. I've written many books and I know which ones I get the most emails about. You can email me at [email protected] — v-a-y-n-e-r-x.com — when you get success from it. Don't hit me up otherwise; my inbox is super full. I look forward to hearing from all of you as you put these strategies into place.

Part one: the TikTokification of social media. At 32 years old, I started getting involved in the world of social media and Web 2.0, as we called it back then. I published episode 1 of Wine Library TV in 2006, a YouTube show where I tasted and reviewed wines — the best gig ever. By the way, side note: I have brought it back. I now call it Wine Text TV. I'm not doing it every day, but I'm trying to do it every week when I'm in New York. So go check it out.

Anyway, shortly after, I started going to events like South by Southwest and getting acquainted with this emerging industry. Up until that point, I was a wine retailer working every day to build my dad's business in an attempt to pay my family back for everything they did for me. At the time, I saw social media and tech as a totally new world of opportunity. As I started going to more events and making connections, I became friends with several people on the 10-to-20-person Facebook team. I built relationships with other leaders in the Silicon Valley tech scene as well. I also started reading up on the budding world of Web 2.0 through sources like TechCrunch.

I had a strong sense early on that social media would completely change the way human beings communicate, and I just wanted to be in the mix. One day, I was presented with an opportunity to invest in a company called Twitter through a friendship I built over some time. By the way, as I moved forward in finalizing that deal, I had to find a law firm in New Jersey to help me execute the process. I found one and came across a junior guy at the firm who was ascending. He went by the name of Mark Yudkin, and he is now my COO and general counsel and brother at VaynerMedia, VaynerX, and all things I do.

Several months later, Randy Zuckerberg called me with an opportunity to buy some of her parents' Facebook stock. I said yes and wrote the biggest check I'd ever written in my life, a six-figure check that pretty much wiped me out of all of my savings. Finally, in the same year, David Karp and I became friends. I believed in his vision for his startup, Tumblr, and later ended up investing in it. Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr were the first three companies I'd ever invested in. Of course, this changed the trajectory of my life.

But there's a funny reason why I tell this story. When I invested in Tumblr, I called my brother and said, "AJ, Tumblr is going to be bigger than Facebook and Twitter. It's going to be the biggest one of all." AJ asked why. I said, "On Facebook and Twitter, you follow people. On Tumblr, you follow things you're interested in." Now, Tumblr didn't become the biggest of the three platforms because there were many other variables, although it did still sell for $1.1 billion to Yahoo in 2013. Still, that early realization about interest-based platforms versus social-based platforms is something that has continued to play out over time in a major way.

This speaks to why I was such a big advocate of something called Musical.ly early on. Released in 2014, Musical.ly was the first social media platform that I saw since Tumblr that was distributing content to users based on their interest — something I will refer to as the interest graph for the rest of this book. I even had two Musical.ly stars come on my show, the AskGaryVee Show, on episode 198 in 2016 because I knew this platform was on to something. A year later, in 2017, ByteDance acquired Musical.ly and merged it into TikTok in 2018.

Since then, TikTok has been the largest champion of the interest graph model, and its execution of the For You page is something that I believe will define the foreseeable future of both social media and other advertising platforms. It already has. Here's why it's so special. At the time of this recording, the default tab users land on when opening the app is the For You page. The content that TikTok surfaces there is based on unique preferences of each user. TikTok considers videos you like or share, how long you watch videos, comments you post, and even the types of content you create. They also consider your device type, the location you're in, language preferences, and more.

All of these factors are processed by TikTok's recommendation engine based on how much you care about each specific factor. The algorithm learns each user's consumption patterns and adjusts their feed's content based on those consumption patterns and how they change over time. In other words, their content feed is led by the interest graph — what you're interested in — rather than the social graph, who you follow. Prior to TikTok's For You page, most platforms were led by the social graph. Some platforms still consider user interests.

Facebook, for example, used to have an algorithm called EdgeRank to determine what content would show up in users' feeds. Every like, share, and new post from a user was counted as an edge, and based on all those edges, Facebook would predict what types of content would be most interesting to that user. If you always liked a particular friend's photos but you skipped over the text-only status updates, the algorithm would show you more of that friend's photos and less of their status updates. Other platforms would consider users' interests as well, but still, the content served would usually be within the container of who users decided to follow.

As social media matured, we soon found out that there were limitations to the social graph-driven content approach over time. When the content you see is based on which accounts you follow, it becomes...

harder to keep you on a platform as your relationships and preferences evolve over the course of your life. You might have subscribed to a YouTube channel in your early 20s about starting a company, but what happens at 27 when those ambitions change? You might have followed some Facebook pages around your favorite artist in high school. But what happens when your music tastes shift within the social graph environment? You would have to actually follow new people or pages to get a steady stream of content you want. It's higher friction and doesn't necessarily guarantee that you'd be seeing the content you want to see. An interest graph-led algorithm, on the other hand, would automatically recognize your changing interests and show that content to you automatically, making it more likely that you'll stay on the platform longer.

At this point, nearly every platform is copying TikTok's interest graph-led algorithm. Meta is making a huge interest graph push through Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels as well as Instagram's Explore page. YouTube has expanded their video recommendation engine as well as their Shorts feed. Twitter X is making a push around their For You video feed as well as their main For You feed that combines various post types. Snapchat is working on their Spotlight feature and LinkedIn is optimizing their own feed as well. As a matter of fact, to go off script, I think I just got an email from LinkedIn that they're about to make a For You type product as well. So, it's just really happening. I'm calling it the TikTokification of social media, and it has major implications for everyone listening to this book.

For the first time ever, the incentives of a business and the advertising channels are truly aligned. Think about it. Instagram doesn't want you to leave the app and go to YouTube Shorts. YouTube doesn't want to lose you to TikTok, and TikTok doesn't want to lose you to Netflix or Spotify. The war for attention is on, which means platforms are incentivized to distribute content that's relevant and valuable to the end consumer. This means that if you make content and advertising that people actually want to watch, you'll be rewarded with more views and engagement. The opportunity for organic reach is virtually unlimited. The more relevant your content is, the more reach you'll get.

This is a huge change, especially for the Madison Avenue advertising world. When a brand buys a billboard or a television spot, the advertising company doesn't magically reward them with more impressions if their advertisement was good. Modern social media platforms do. For example, if BMW makes a crappy ad and runs it on television, NBC won't care. They'll happily still take the money. The modern social media platforms don't want users to make bad content, which makes them more aligned with the advertiser.

Prior to the TikTokification of social media, marketing on social media platforms had a similar dynamic to email marketing. With email, you would spend time building a list and then market to that list. Similarly, with social media, you would spend time building up your following base and then you'd market to that following base with your content. Much like email, only a small percentage of your social media audience would see each one of your posts.

Now, businesses, creators, and brands don't need to have a follower base before you can start getting views and engagement. You could create an account on any social platform in this book today, put some content out over the course of this week, and you actually have a shot of getting thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of views. It just depends on whether your content is good enough or not. Learn to make compelling, relevant content at scale, and the platform will distribute your content to people who are interested in consuming it.

Even with my millions of followers on TikTok, if I post a piece of content no one wants to watch, it might only get a few thousand views. Meanwhile, if a car dealership with 15 followers posts a video relevant to people who want to buy cars, it may get millions of views and have people coming to the dealership from different parts of the state. Similarly, if a regular guy working at a potato factory posts a light-hearted video drinking Ocean Spray juice on his longboard, it might just change his entire life. This is the power of the TikTokification of social media.

You potentially could get 100 views, then 10,000 on your next piece of content, then back to 300 on the next one, then up to 500,000 on the following one, and on and on and on. That's what happens when the creative is the variable of success, not the number of followers you have. By the way, the word creative and content mean the same thing. I'll use them interchangeably in this book.

Of course, the numbers may vary based on the platform. Certain platforms may still have a higher value on how many followers you have than others. Not every platform's interest graph algorithm is as advanced as TikTok's at the time of this recording, but I believe the variability in views in each piece of content you post will only get wider and wider over time. Every platform is moving in this direction.

This puts small businesses and creators on a much more even playing field with large companies, which means major brands now have to worry about small companies taking their market share. Beverage brands across the board have to compete with Logan Paul and KSI's Prime Hydration, for example. Folgers has to compete with Chamberlain Coffee. In this new social media world, a creator who truly understands how to capture attention could start a skincare line tomorrow that competes with the biggest names in the industry.

Today, people that know how to make content will have a leg up on big brands, many of which are still trying to pass off overpriced television ads as social media content. In fact, I predict that over the next 10 to 15 years, human-based consumer brands will become the biggest issue for the largest consumer brands in the world. That was a journey I went on with Empathy Wines back in 2019 and the journey that MrBeast is currently on with Feastables.

Everyone is competing for the same limited space in the user's feed. And the best way to win that space is making more relevant content. More relevance equals more reach.

Advertising in the world of the interest graph. So if relevance is what we all need to be aiming at, how do we know what kinds of content would be the most relevant to the end user? How do we know what kinds of content people actually want to consume and what will get the most meaningful distribution?

Fortunately, you don't have to guess. With interest graph-driven algorithms, you can find out the truth for yourself for zero additional cost beyond what it takes to make the creative. Make a piece of content based on who you want to reach and what you think they may be interested in. Post it on one of your platforms of your choice and look at your post analytics and comments to see what happens. Did it do better than the account's average performance? Did it do worse? Who did the platform end up serving it to based on your analytics? In other words, who was actually interested in consuming it versus who you thought would be interested in consuming it? Any interesting observations in the comments? You can use all these observations to make your next piece of content even better.

This is a game-changer, especially for large brands. Currently, they might be spending months defining guidelines for the content and ads they want to put out, between defining their target audience, doing research, conducting focus groups, selling ideas through various internal decision makers, and more. This process is slow, outdated, and built for those developing TV commercials.

In a pre-social media era, brands would decide to spend $8 million on a commercial between agency fees, production, and the media cost, and use a combination of their research and subjective opinions to make generic 30-second videos that would appeal to the various demographics that watch it. Today, with the interest graph algorithms, instead of putting months and months of research, effort, and the resources into a television commercial that people will most likely not watch, brands can put out content, aka social media ads, every day based on the hypothesis of what will work and get actual results to validate or invalidate their hypothesis. They can rely on reactions from the market instead of 10 people in a focus group.

For example, let's say you're leading marketing efforts for a large athletic clothing brand and you want to make a TV commercial to get more moms across the US to buy your clothing. You can make 20, 30, 40 different pieces of content for narrow demographics of moms. I'm going to go off script here. I didn't put this in the book. I mean yoga moms in Seattle ages 35 to 40. I mean, Latin American moms living in Texas that are into UFC, ages 50 to 60, narrow groups, not this 18 to 35 that you might have heard of in a marketing book.

You can make 20, 30, 40 different pieces of content for narrow demographics of moms. Post them across social media platforms and see what happens. Observe what pieces of content perform better than the average from your account. See who ends up consuming that piece of content through your analytics. Note what words and messages catch the attention and use those learnings to help your higher production, higher budget commercials.

It's similar to how stand-up comedians try out different material. They go in front of smaller crowds and a bunch of different comedy clubs to see what lines work and with whom, and use those learnings to make their next show even better. By the time they do their big Netflix comedy special, there's very little guessing involved. They already know what to do. Similarly, learning from social media marketing can help brands mitigate risk on higher production campaigns.

I call this marketing for the sake of better marketing. You do actual marketing with the goal of building brand and sales through social media. And you also use those learnings from the content to do even better marketing in the future. The confusion is that these companies approach these social media posts with a mindset of test and learn. Throw it against the wall and see what sticks, or even worse, spray and pray. Just to remind you, this is marketing for the sake of better marketing.

Going to go off script right now for everybody to understand what I just said there. In advertising land, almost every big company, you know, Coca-Cola, Nike, BMW, Froot Loop cereal, all the big brands, you know, they all disrespect social. They think the important thing is the commercial. And then when they come up with a commercial, they post matching luggage on social media to reinforce what they guessed in a boardroom amongst five people.

What I'm saying here is social media should be the place they market every day with all those ideas they had and then take the quant and qual, you know, feedback and build on it. Quant and qual meaning the math and the words that they get from the comments. This is flipping the model that advertising has worked on for the last 70 years. This is what's going to work. This is what is working.

And small businesses, VC-backed businesses, and definitely every individual here who's an entrepreneur or an operator know this to be true because you don't have the options to do million-dollar videos in commercial form. So, you're learning and building up here. For big brands, they're missing the mark. And this is very important.

This applies to creators and small businesses, too. Say you have a business with $250 a month to spend on paid advertising. Instead of debating what content to run as an ad this month, you can post a bunch of organic content, see which ones resonate, and turn those pieces of content into ads to drive sales, aka brandformance. If the content already did well when you posted it organically, you have more proof that it will work when you run it as an ad, mitigating your risk.

As you'll hear in this book, the amount of data available across social media platforms is immense. For example, at the time of this recording, you can see how many people viewed your video versus swiped away on YouTube Shorts. You can see average watch time on your TikTok videos. You can see how many followers versus non-followers viewed your Instagram and Facebook Reels. You can see the job titles of individuals who consumed your content on LinkedIn. You can track metrics like views, saves, shares, likes, and comments on certain platforms to see how people engage with your content.

There are many ways to use this data. For example, large brands can make skits on TikTok featuring different potential mascots with a variety of character traits. They can observe reactions in the comments before building the mascot into a much bigger part of their brand. Think Geico using content to test Martin the Gecko against Geico caveman to see which character resonated with people best.

E-commerce companies can make TikToks with simple items they're thinking of selling and decide whether to carry the inventory after seeing whether people are interested in the product. If a local restaurant is debating a new menu item to add, they can make a video asking the question, run it as a Facebook ad to their local area, and use community feedback as a data point in making the decision. In the new social media world, everything is about the content itself, not the people who choose to follow you. Creative is the variable of success.

You're going to like this. This is literally real time how my brain works. Watch this one. Might even, you know what? We may even use this. Yeah, let's keep recording here. Everyone's about to see something pretty darn cool. I've never done this in a book reading before.

Hey, ma'am. Hey, Brent. Um, I'm recording my book and I was reading it and I just had an idea that I want you to do. They probably left. You're not recording any commercials right now, right? No, they actually just left. They'll be downstairs. No worries. No worries. We'll do it next week.

I want you to do an ad walking through the wine aisles next week that says, 'Hey, local area,' we'll run in a 5 or 10 mile radius. 'Hey, local friends, we know these ads are working. I want you to email me at brandonwinelibrary.com. Which wines do we not carry in the store that you'd like us to permanently carry? Just email me down below in the copy.' We're going to run that in a 10 mile radius. The ad is literally going to tell people that if they email you, we'll take it into serious consideration and we'll get all the feedback.

Got it. I think it's going to work. I think it's going to make people feel part of the community of the store. I think it has a chance of going crazy. You like it? Yes, 100%. They feel a part of it. Exactly. And then you're going to build relationship the whole night. I love it. All right. I got to read my book. See you. Love you. Bye. See you. Love you.

There you go, big people. That's how the sausage is made right here. I got inspired by my own book to come up with an ad. Obviously I wanted that rolling for all of you because obviously anyone in retail could do the same thing I'm doing there. Produce store, bodega, things of that nature. The five mile, 10 mile radius Instagram, Facebook ads are remarkable. People see them. So keep that in mind.

Part two, the modern advertising framework. There are two ways to invest. You can either make long-term bets, go to sleep, and wait for the returns to show up over time, or you can day trade. Both are different ways to do it. Marketing used to be like the former. Brands would spend months planning out a campaign, execute on traditional channels like television, and bet on the fact that it would work out.

Today, marketing is like day trading. If you're not staying ahead of the curve every day, somebody is outflanking you. That means your strategies need to be far more sophisticated than ever. In part three, I'll go into extreme detail on the six core variables to win in this new environment. Your level of success will largely depend on how deeply you understand these variables and how much you incorporate them into your advertising strategy. It's why part three is the deepest section in this book. I'm giving you all the details.

Before we get there, though, here's an overview of the core variables that make up the modern advertising framework. Later, you'll see how they all work together. When you're making content, the first step is to develop cohorts or cohort development, defining who you want to reach. This term refers to the buckets, often narrow but sometimes broad consumer segmentations that you'll want to try to reach.

Platforms and culture, or PAC, the new requirement for your advertising knowledge. PAC, again, that's platforms and culture, is a two-pronged framework that should inform the content you create. First, you have to know the platforms, or more specifically, the creative units and features on the platforms you're posting on. By creative units, I mean the types of creative you post on each platform. On Instagram, some of the creative units are stories, Reels, and carousels.

You have to know the nuances of these creative units. For example, how long can an Instagram Reel be? Do you know which creative units are getting the most organic reach on each platform? Do you know how carousels on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok appear differently in feed? The reason this is important is it helps you ideate your content. If you know that a LinkedIn carousel has to be uploaded as a PDF document whereas an Instagram carousel is uploaded as a series of images or videos directly in the app, then that will impact your ideation around each piece of creative.

The other aspect of PAC is culture. Are there any current events related to your business category that your cohorts would like to know about? What influencers and celebrities might your cohorts be following? Do you know how to speak to your cohorts based on their interests and slang?

Strategic organic content, or SOC, is the content that you post across platforms to build relevance, brand, and sales, or what I think modern good advertising looks like. I added the S in SOC because content must be strategic. SOC is about the small details such as what do the first three seconds look like in a video? What's your copy, aka the post caption, the title text you add to a video, how long your video is, and more. PAC knowledge can help you make more strategic organic content.

Amplification refers to any tactic that lets you reach even more people through your content. It's spending against what works, aka not wasting a penny. That means running paid ads on social media platforms, running ads on streaming services, influencer marketing, TV commercials, outdoor media, and more. The content you decide to amplify would be informed by SOC insights. What pieces are overperforming? Which ones are getting more comments?

For example, you could decide to take a piece of overperforming strategic organic content, add some sales-focused elements to it, and run it as a brand performance ad with slight tweaks since, you know, the content has already been validated by the interest graph algorithm. I'm going to go off script here for a second.

For everyone that's selling on social media, DTC ads, as you know, you've had a test and learn, test and learn, try different variations, but you were kind of guessing. You made an ad, you'd spend a little money on Facebook. If it did well, then you'd put more money on it. But the creative was always the variable. Now, you could take your organic posts. When something really hits, you bring it back into production, you tweak it a little bit, and instead of making it just a brand ad, you add a call to action. It's like adding a right hook within a jab. You're adding a sales element to it.

You might just change the copy. You might just add something to the end. You might add something to the beginning, but the essence of the video, you know, already resonates, thus making it more likely that that ad will outperform your other ads. This is a big shift and a big opportunity for people that sell videos people want to watch, aka modern commercials.

These are more broadly relatable, higher production videos that you can make depending on your resources. Unlike traditional commercials, modern-day commercials are pieces of content that don't feel like an ad. People actually want to watch them, and the production is always informed by the insights and observations from the content, aka SOC, you're putting out across all the platforms. Please note, this is a video that looks like a skit from a sitcom, a music video, a movie trailer, or an SNL skit. The videos people actually want to watch in the world.

Post-creative strategy is all about listening. Listening to actual consumers and gathering insights. We call this PCS. Post-creative strategist is actually a role at VaynerMedia. People do this for a living. Once strategic organic content gets posted, read the comments on your content and the comments on other accounts that are relevant to who you are trying to reach. This way, you'll get a better sense of what's resonating, what isn't, and who your content is reaching.

PCS insights help make your next piece of SOC even better and help you uncover new cohorts or eliminate existing cohorts as needed. In a nutshell, that's the framework. Define who you want to reach. Use platform knowledge and cultural signals to make strategic content, and leverage insights from data and comments to decide what ads to run and what to build on further for higher production pieces of content. In the enhancement, you'll find a graphic that illustrates the overall process.

And look at that. There's the graphic. I know everybody listening doesn't have it, but remember the QR code, the enhancements to give you a little preview of what the process looks like in action. Here's a simple example. Let's say you have a small business that sells kids' clothing. How would you use the modern advertising framework to build a brand and drive sales?

Before you jump into running ads, throwing money into high production commercials, or even making content, you need to get a sense of number one, who do you want to reach. Number two, what those people care about so that you can make the kind of advertising they actually want to consume. By now, you know if people are interested in consuming your advertising, you'll stay relevant and top of mind. Relevance is what leads to consideration and eventually sales.

The first step is in identifying a variety of different consumer segments or cohorts so that you can make different advertising that's relevant to them rather than something generic that's meant to appeal to everyone based on your business objectives. Maybe you decide to focus on millennial moms who recently had their first kid and dads who have young daughters, aka girl dads, amongst 30 or 40 other cohorts.

Next, go into each platform and do some research on what these cohorts naturally watch and engage with. With platform search capabilities consistently improving, you can type in something like 'girl dad' into the search bar and find videos relevant to that group. Spend some time going through the hashtags and search results. Notice what creative formats and styles are overperforming. Notice what's underperforming. Notice how the content differs across platforms.

Are people using similar words in the title of their videos? Are they using the same audio? Are people using certain platform features such as duets, polls, or video replies in the comments? What kinds of content are companies and brands posting? What kinds of content are actual human beings posting?

These platform and culture insights, known as PAC, will inform what your strategic organic content will look like, known as SOC. Instead of blindly making content in a spray-and-pray manner, you can first narrow in on number one, your creative unit, such as a standard TikTok video as opposed to a carousel or just a photo. Number two, your creative format, such as filming a TikTok video with POV, 'you're a girl dad' in the title.

And number three, platform features you want to use, such as TikTok's content creation tools to type out the title in-app as opposed to adding it through a different video editing software like Adobe or something like that. If you click on the videos titled 'POV, you're a girl dad' from the search results, you might notice many of them have a similar style. At the time of this recording, many of them feature dads with their wives and daughters, and the camera angle alternates between them as they lip-sync parts of a song.

You could decide to make a similar video. Or if you're not a dad with daughters and there's no one in your company who can help, you could start with a different creative format. For example, in the enhancement, you'll find a QR code that will link you to a video of an apparel shop titled 'POV taking a shower when you're a girl dad,' which is a video of a guy walking into the shower and stepping over a bunch of bath care products.

Maybe you could try a few variations based on common situations that girl dads experience. Some variations could tie into kids' clothing products in a creative way and others be more broadly relatable to girl dads. Once you know what you want to make, you can then execute with strategic organic content principles in mind.

For example, if you know you're making TikTok videos with SOC knowledge, you know you need to capture attention right away in the first three seconds, maybe even one second. By the way, this might mean your title needs to be relatable and placed in the beginning so people know right away what the video is about. You might also add certain camera angles, cuts, and movements in the early part of the video to keep people watching.

If you're making the same video for Snapchat, the SOC would look different. Maybe you change the title to make it more relatable for young people as opposed to dads, and in-app Snapchat narrative style. Please note, Snapchat has not aged up in its content platform the way TikTok has. I know many of you listening to this probably have Snapchat and TikTok in the same place demographics-wise, but they're considerably different.

The consumption on TikTok has aged up far more in the directions we've seen historically from Facebook and Instagram. While Snapchat, because it's used more as a messaging platform for the youth, has stayed quite young. Thus, the people we're targeting in the content part of Snapchat Spotlight and Discover skew younger.

If a piece of content you post resonates, which you can measure based on how many views it gets compared to the average on your account, the type of engagement it gets, how many sales you get as a result of posting it organically, or other indicators, the next step is to amplify it. If the girl dad video hit, that means you now have a piece of content that has proven to work. You can amplify this through an ad on TikTok, for example.

You could repurpose that piece of content into a Facebook ad, potentially layer on some targeting, such as men in the US who are parents of preschool-age kids 3 to 5, and see if it resonates there, too. You could use tools like TikTok Creator Marketplace or YouTube BrandConnect to partner with influencers in the parenting category who could take the learnings from your organic content success and build on it with similar content advertising your products.

Depending on your resources, you could also create more broadly relatable modern commercials using the learnings from your strategic content. Maybe you posted 25 different videos with relatable scenarios for girl dads similar to the examples that we've talked about, such as 'POV, you're a girl dad getting ready in the morning,' 'POV, you're a girl dad coming back from work,' 'POV, you're a girl dad watching the game,' and more.

If you notice three or four of those got a lot of traction, more than the rest, you could build those into a funny skit made for increased distribution that's geared towards a broader audience, for example, with direct response elements like a QR code at the end to drive traffic to your site.

You could also make a different version of the same video sending people to a URL that's in your account, such as driving to a link in bio on Instagram instead of a QR code as an alternative lower-friction approach to drive traffic to your URL. Contextual versions of the video could go on YouTube as well as other platforms depending on the length of the skit along with SOC and PAC elements.

You could also amplify it further on YouTube pre-roll ads targeting in-market audiences related to kids' clothing, Google's way of identifying people who are in-market to purchase. You could run it as a commercial on OTT, streaming services like Hulu, connected TV devices like Roku, or free ad-supported streaming services, FAST channels like Pluto TV.

Although detailed targeting capabilities on these platforms are still being developed, and your cost per thousand impressions, aka CPMs, might be higher than on social media, you can spend it with a little more confidence knowing that your content has already been validated. One of the key characteristics of this form of advertising is to use social media for both quantitative and qualitative insights on actual consumer beliefs around your creative. Therefore, mitigating the risk when you take it to bigger and more expensive formats and distributions.

Throughout the entire process, you'll be reading the comments on every one of your posts and paying close attention to consumer behavior across your cohort segmentations. This level of listening is what I call post-creative strategy. These are the insights that help you make your next piece of content even better than your last.

For example, reading the comments could help you pick up an inside joke that only girl dads would get, which could lead to a new piece of SOC. It could also help you uncover new cohorts you may have not considered. Maybe you notice daughters of girl dads leaving comments about how much they relate to these videos. Maybe you realize they're the ones driving some of the above-average distribution of the videos by sending it to their dads. You can add them to your cohort list.

Do research on the content they like and consume. Post a few pieces of SOC for them made for sharability and go through the rest of the process as needed. You might even notice some comments that spark ideas for new products, collaborations with other brands, partnerships with certain influencers, or lead to new terminology, slang for you to use in your copywriting for future posts. Make sense?

The same framework works for large brands, too. Let's take a different example. Say you're leading marketing for a national brand in the consumer packaged goods, CPG, space, and you do want to drive in-store sales. You want more consumers to walk into places like Kroger and Walmart and buy your product off the shelf. How would you use this framework to do that?

You would start by looking at your business objectives to determine your cohort categories. Based on the store locations your brands are in, you would narrow in on areas that have strong potential for sales growth, such as areas where your brand isn't as developed, but the category is established with high demand, and areas where you have strong distribution.

Depending on your business, there may be other factors you consider as well, but the main thing is to find areas where you're most likely to get the highest sales increase for your marketing investment. Then you break down who you are trying to reach at a more granular level. If you're selling environmentally friendly cleaning products, maybe you make content for 25 to 29-year-old women in Los Angeles interested in sustainability. Maybe you make content for 45 to 50-year-old moms in Chattanooga who wear sustainable clothing.

You could do the same across all your key store locations. Cohorts could be informed by your existing sales data in each region, such as who's buying your product, how much potential you have in each market to get more of those customers, or if you need to win over a different demographic segment.

Once you have 20, 30, 40 plus consumer segmentations, you can then go into each advertising platform and start getting a feel for the creative units and content formats that these groups want to consume. You can gather PAC insights to help inform what consumer-centric content really actually looks like. Just like how we searched 'girl dad' on TikTok and Facebook Reels in a prior example, you could search things like 'sustainable fashion' or 'Chattanooga parents' and see what pops up.

You can see what cultural references different groups are using, what songs they're listening to, and gather other information you can then use to make strategic organic content. A lot of Fortune 500 brands struggle with this because of their own internal subjective interpretations of what quality content looks like.

Many of them overly stick to their brand guidelines and make content that subjectively fits the brand's persona instead of what people want to consume. Companies are convinced that it's not on brand to post content with different fonts, colors, thumbnails, and product use cases, but in reality, these restrictions just make their content less interesting.

Brands should think about how they can convey different messages to different people instead of trying to force the same formats and messaging in all of their ads. People will only consider buying something if it means something to them. The only way to make a brand meaningful is to make it relevant to as many different people as possible. I call this being boardroom-centric versus being consumer-centric.

It's the biggest issue facing the biggest brands in the world today. Until the past is debated more properly through contemporary consumer behavior lenses, the biggest brands in the world will continue to lose market share to many of the brands that are going to be started by the people listening to this book.

Once you're making SOC for your consumer segments, next is constantly paying attention to your analytics and your comments to see which ones are hitting. If you're targeting 45 to 50-year-old moms in LA interested in sustainable clothing, you can make a video for them. Add a Los Angeles location tag, make city-specific references in your video, and your content may actually get organically distributed to those users in the city.

Next comes amplification. If the north star for your CPG brand is to get more households to buy your product, one option out of many is to turn your overperforming organic content into ads on Facebook and Instagram with the goal of maximizing reach. You could target 45 to 50-year-old moms interested in sustainable clothing within a 5-mile radius of the store that carries your product.

If your goal is to get more reach, the platform will show your ads to as many people as possible within your designated target at the time of this recording. The reason I say 'at the time of this recording' is Facebook's ad targeting capabilities change all the time. This goes back to the essence of day trading attention. Once you listen to this book, I promise you, you'll be on a journey of having to put in this work all the time, every day, every hour, every minute.

And I know that sounds daunting, but the reality is you get what you put into it. So, you don't have to do it every second like me because I'm a maniac, but you can't not do it ever. And so, if you do it multiple times a week instead of never, you're going to get those results.

If your content already resonated with the group organically, there's potentially less risk of missing the mark when you amplify the content with a goal like reach in your ad content. You could also incentivize people to go to the store and even take photos and share them on their own socials with a hashtag so that you can use the additional content.

Media dollars especially matter in situations like this when trying to get sales with customers in a specific local area because your organic content may not reach people within the city alone. So targeting your overperforming content within your select local regions becomes especially important.

This new way of running media is based on actual consumer intent. Instead of relying on subjective opinions of internal decision makers to make important media buying decisions, you can use consumer data from both organic and paid social media to drive some of your more expensive high-produced ad campaigns.

In this specific scenario, you could also potentially go to Instagram, type in each of your store locations in the search bar, scroll through top posts in the area, and find local influencers who may be able to be paid to do meet and greets at your stores, assuming the retailer would allow that kind of thing to happen. Let me explain that for everybody. If you're a brand and you're being sold by different retailers, obviously you need to get the retailer to approve you doing these kind of campaigns. Obviously, if you own your own stores, then you're the one doing that.

Based on the content that's resonating in organic, paid social, and influencer campaigns, you can turn those into higher production modern commercials on OTT and CTV, aka connected TV devices targeting your location, zip codes, outdoor media near your stores, or traditional television.

If you're buying remnant inventory and the cost makes sense, with Roku and Instacart's recent partnership before the recording of this, CPG brands can run ads on Roku and see whether people bought on Instacart after seeing the ad. With platforms like The Trade Desk, brands can buy premium inventory on major networks and streaming services and even use first-party data information that's collected by the customer base of the subscribers for more precise targeting.

With these modern-day ad platforms, you could use customer insights to make commercials with direct response focus that people actually want to watch. You can build a brand and sales at the same time. When it comes to attribution, you can look at actual sales reports from your store to see whether the strategy worked.

You can look at incremental sales numbers of the stores and locations you made content for and compare them against stores that you didn't drive foot traffic to. If you keep other variables constant, that is, you don't drive sales through discounts and you don't change your product's placement in the stores, then you'll know whether brand building and relevance is leading to sales instead of relying on brand lift studies or other proxy reports.

Let's take another example. This time, say you're running a local arts nonprofit and every summer you put on a series of shows in your small town featuring artwork done by the kids in the area. Your goal is to drive more donations and you don't have money or resources. How would you get more donors?

When you don't have a lot of time or content creation resources, the biggest thing to do is to set up a system where you record long-form content that can then be chopped up into clips that you can post across platforms. For a lot of people, starting a weekly podcast is the most practical way to do that.

In this situation, the number one thing is to film the art shows from as many different angles as possible because that will give you footage that you can use in your advertising content. If the show is open for a few hours and people are just walking through, you'd want to walk out of there knowing you can have 40, 50, 70 moments that you can use for content.

Remember, you don't need a high-budget super camera from Hollywood. There are plenty of cameras that can get the job done, including the one on your phone. During the show, it's important for the founder or someone else from the organization to go around and interview people, asking questions that have potential to overperform as social media content.

This is where understanding cohort segments becomes valuable. If you know that your most common donors are 40 to 50-year-old parents living in your town, then maybe you can interview those kinds of people as they are walking through the show or ask questions that are interesting to that demographic.

When you post-produce that content and post those clips across platforms, other 40 to 50-year-old parents in your area may feel more affinity towards your organization when they see people who look like them right away in the first three seconds of the video, potentially people they even know.

There are two main reasons for interviewing people at the show. One, it saves you time so you can rely on the show footage for content rather than coming up with new ideas on your own. Two, if you scroll through your feeds across social, chances are you'll see some clips where two people are doing a Q&A with another person in public. These street interviews can be appealing because they come off authentic and real, and this creative format may get distribution as a result.

As you're asking questions, think of what you can ask that the broader public may be interested in. Instead of asking, 'Did you have a good time here?' or 'What's your favorite part of the show?' which can also be useful to gather testimonials and reviews, also ask questions about what their favorite memory was from their own art class growing up.

Ask about a funny story that happened or their art nightmare from school. Ask fun questions like, 'What color paint are you and why?' Ask questions that could lead to greater distribution, ones that get more organic reach than your standard pieces of content. This kind of relatable content could do well across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, and YouTube long-form.

When you post-edit the footage for each platform, that's where SOC and PAC knowledge come into play. Maybe you connect with a bunch of parents from your town on LinkedIn and post videos from your personal profile. If you believe that they're likely donors, then connecting with them on LinkedIn would make it more likely that they'll see your videos.

As you're editing with SOC in mind, you try to find a few different variations of the videos. Some clips could start off with a fun question in the first three seconds, like, 'What was the craziest story from art class growing up?' If the person interviewed gave a wild response, you could do another version of the video where you start with their answer instead of the question.

Post both versions across platforms, tweaking the copy for each platform so it's contextual, and gather insights on what worked and what didn't. If one version did overperform your average on Facebook Reels but underperformed on YouTube, then you could dig into the analytics and comments and start thinking about why.

For nonprofits specifically, it's worth considering how direct you want to be with asking for donations in your organic content. Maybe 50% of your content could be about building general awareness around your organization and what it does, which would lead to people clicking on the profile and visiting your donation page on their own. And 50% of your content could literally ask for donations directly in the copy or in the last frame of your video.

Every nonprofit should play in their own ratios here, but no one should be 100% in either direction. In this scenario, if you're getting 50 to 100 views on your Instagram account on an average over the previous month posting organically, but three of your new clips show that you got 400 to 500 views each, then you can consider amplifying those with paid advertising.

You could spend $100 on the three clips and run them as Instagram video ads with a goal of driving donations, with your ad copy asking people to donate in a direct way. You could target them against everyone in a 10-mile radius of your town and rely on the algorithm to find people most likely to convert.

Does this all feel like a lot to consider so far? Between developing cohorts, making strategic organic content, applying insights about platforms and culture, creating modern-day commercials, learning amplification strategies, and doing post-creative strategy, I have empathy for how this may seem like a lot. The problem is that this is the reality of...

what it takes to be successful in modern advertising and the environment we're in now. I'm going off script right now. That was really tough. Like there's a lot there. Like I'm sure a lot of people are just like, what just happened? But when you relisten to this, if you rewind and listen to the last 10 minutes, like I'm telling you right now, this is the framework for the game. And the reality is the business world does not care about your feelings. Nobody's going to cry for you if you're not willing to do this and you like doing direct mail and yellow pages 30 years ago. Marketing has changed. You either change with it or you don't. I'm not saying that for tough love. I'm saying that for real life. This is how it's always been in business. And maybe you'll listen to this book and decide it's time to sell your business. And that's a good idea. You're better off selling your business at this level than letting it decline for another two years and getting less for your business. But if you're not in that place and you're ready to put in the work, stick with me. We're about to go deeper.

So, where should you start? If you're in a full-time job right now and you want to build a business around your passion for cooking, what's step one? First, I think everyone gets too caught up in trying to boil the ocean. As you continue listening to this book, understand that you shouldn't have all of this figured out at once. Long before you can dunk a basketball, you must learn how to walk and not wet your pants.

As you go through this book, start to finish, think about what comes most naturally to you and which skills you're most interested in developing. If you're good at staying tapped into cultural trends, then start there. Even if your videos aren't strategically produced with the platform nuances in mind, they'll still do decent if you're making smart cultural references. If you're a little more type A and you love learning about strategy, such as what are the first three seconds of the video and what should they look like and how do you optimize those videos based on watch time and analytics and retention and all that, then start there. If you want to quit your full-time job to pursue your passion of cooking, the first thing I would do is just start making food content. Take as much as you can from this book and implement it. After posting consistently multiple times a day for several months, then you can start challenging yourself to incorporate more elements and variables that you hadn't done before. Think of it like working out. When you first start working out, maybe you just want to get your stamina up from the treadmill. Then you start working on your muscles with the lowest weight that you can lift. As you keep going, you can start doing more challenging workouts with more weight. But in the early days, you just have to get yourself to the gym. It's no different when it comes to being a prolific content creator and advertiser. Just start.

Part three, the core variables. Cohort development, defining who you want to reach.

Before you can make a piece of content or any ad, the most important question to ask yourself is, why am I making this? That's why cohort development is the step where we start with. Cohorts are labels that describe any current customers or clients, potential customers or clients, and give you a framework for what content to create. This way, instead of serving a single message to a mass audience, you make content that's relevant to each individual cohort. If we're serving ice cream to a large crowd, you wouldn't just give everyone vanilla because people like different flavors. Cohort development is about defining different audience segments so you know what flavors to serve them. When brands make commercials for traditional television, it's hard to make them for specific cohorts in mind because the network's audience is usually very broad. On social media platforms, however, we can make content for a variety of different cohorts because contemporary interest graph algorithms will serve it to whoever wants to watch it. We can create brand relevance through that content and potentially also use insights from it in the form of TV commercials, outdoor media campaigns, and other contemporary marketing efforts instead of the other way around. That is, making generic TV commercials for a broad viewership and then using those same assets on social media.

A few things to consider when defining your cohorts are: one, define cohorts with teeth. For example, instead of the 18 to 35-year-old males, what if you made content for 18 to 22-year-old males living in New York who are into basketball? Instead of 20 to 35-year-old professionals, what if you made content for 25 to 30-year-old females in LA making over 75,000 a year? Instead of 30 to 45-year-old moms, what if you made content for 40 to 45-year-old moms in Singapore who have an affinity for high fashion? I call these cohorts with teeth. In other words, specific segmentations that give you the opportunity to create more relevant content. A 21-year-old guy in New York who's into basketball will respond to a very different piece of creative than a 20-year-old guy in Tennessee who goes hiking every weekend. Grouping them both into the bucket of 18 to 35-year-old males doesn't give as big of an opportunity to make them care about your brand or business. This especially applies to large brands that are at national scale and need every human being knowing about them. Take an iconic brand like Nike, for example. Advertisers may think that everyone associates Nike with the 'Just Do It', but that's just not true. Some people buy their sneakers because of the brand association with street culture. Some people buy it because they are fans of Virgil Abloh. Others buy from the brand because they like to go to an outlet store 30 minutes away from their city in a rural suburb and get a good deal on sweatpants. Brands have different meanings for different people. Defining cohorts with teeth can help you achieve that.

Number two, think of cohorts like an accordion. Bet you didn't think accordion was going to be referenced in this book. By the way, if you play the accordion, hit me up on Twitter, @garyvee. Just curious how many accordion players are listening to this book. All right, let's get into it. If you have a retail store that sells primarily to a female customer base, you might initially think that your cohort segments would be all women. But after putting out 10 to 20 pieces of content, maybe you notice in the comments that husbands of female shoppers are secretly excited about being dragged along to your store. With that observation, you can make content for them with the hypothesis that maybe they'll share it with their wives and they'll both feel fonder towards your store as a result. You can then define a new cohort with teeth that represents husbands of your female shoppers. Another example, maybe you put out a few pieces of content aimed at 18 to 22-year-old males into basketball in New York, but you notice in the comments that you're getting meaningful engagement from people referencing the Knicks. You might decide to tweak that cohort to 18 to 22-year-old male Knicks fans in New York. Or you might look at the analytics for the post and notice that it's being served to a whole different city altogether, which means you can hypothesize why the piece of content resonated more broadly. Based on actual results and engagement from your pieces of content, you can add, remove, or adjust your segments as needed. Since your cohorts will always be shrinking, expanding, and changing based on your post-creative strategy insights from the comments, which I'll explore more later, stick with me. I like to think of them as an accordion. In fact, it's quite common for us at VaynerMedia to eliminate some cohorts we're working with altogether after one to four months and stand up two to four new cohorts that came from the insights from the comment section.

Number three, consider the business objectives of your company. Look at consumer segments that you've historically done well with, or areas where you intuitively know that you need to grow. If moms 27 to 35 in Salt Lake City have bought from you repeatedly, and maybe you want to double down on that and go even narrower on the segment, such as moms 27 to 35 in Salt Lake City who are into yoga, or high-income moms who have a house in Park City, Utah. If you believe your product should be doing better with certain customer segmentations, you can lean into that as well. Let's say you're a content creator who does card tricks and you have ambitions to sell out a show in Las Vegas one day. Say your current audience consists of young males. In this case, you'd need to create cohorts like 40 to 46-year-old moms in Chicago. Why? Because that will dictate the ideation of your content and will help you make different stuff that will resonate with different people. If you know you're going to be making content to 40 to 46-year-old moms in Chicago with teenage sons, the content you're going to make will be made with an attempt to appeal to that mom, as opposed to the algorithm, what you think is a viral trend of the moment, or what your friends and other young men are going to like. It completely changes the starting point for the ideation of your creative, therefore allowing your brand to broaden. Now, you'd be trying to find a mom in a mall to do a magic trick for. And after the act, you could ask a quick question like, 'Just an extra minute for my TikTok. What's the toughest thing about raising a son?' That piece of content might help new audiences find you and become interested in you.

Number four, define a high volume of cohorts. Many brands only define a handful of broad cohorts, which often results in generic creative that isn't meaningful to the audience that's consuming it. The more cohorts you define, the more opportunities you have to create relevance for your business or brand. Based on results from your content, you can always add or remove cohorts. One important note, especially for high-end brands in the luxury category, is that making content for more people doesn't mean you have to compromise your production value. Just because your photo shoot or video shoot was done on a cattle ranch because you're trying to win with the demographic doesn't mean that you're compromising the quality of your content or the quality of your product. For luxury brands specifically, I would argue that they could benefit from a little bit more casual content scattered throughout to make them a little bit more approachable with a little more humility. That being said, I'm incredibly empathetic after being in boardrooms with many of the biggest luxury brands in the world that this is not going to happen overnight. That's unfortunate because what luxury brands have done over the last 20 years with streetwear brands and their collaborations has broadened their appeal dramatically. Their narrow focus on the subjective opinions on the production value of their content on social media is limiting their opportunity to grow their business. Very few people will be turned off by their human content, and many more will finally consider buying from them because the content felt more relevant and approachable to them. When you make content for a variety of different cohorts, you're trading on the context, not the production value. This is something that a lot of high-end brands struggle with. As a whole, they don't do as much content with a wide range of consumer segments because they think it will compromise their brand. In reality, I think it has a lot more to do with the internal politics at their organizations and the desire of creative directors to stay in control. Not that it's an impossible task from the brand standpoint. It's true that sometimes you need to say no to making certain types of content to preserve the brand. I value no very much, but when you only say yes four out of 4,000 times, your balance is way off. Everything's best in balance. The social media creative conversation with luxury brands is very clear to me. They are truly treating it like a fashion show or a Vogue print ad, and they're missing a ton of opportunities.

Number five, the creative you produce could hit multiple cohorts. The methodology here isn't always linear. Sometimes you might think of a piece of content you want to try out that doesn't clearly fall into one of the cohorts might fall into multiple. You might have a piece of content that you just really want to make, or an idea that multiple cohorts might be interested in. Cohort labels are just hypotheses that you can come back to and refine later. Don't be crippled by the content that could fall into multiple buckets. I'm going to go off script here. What I'm scared of is creating anything that stops you from creativity. Right now, what I'm attacking is subjective opinions and corporate politics. But what I'm scared of is if I put cohorts on a pedestal, you don't realize that you still have freedom within a framework. Right? If you have a great idea and you have a bottled water and you have a great idea for hikers, but you didn't establish a hiking, you know, cohort, that's okay. You can create a wildcard cohort. I do that a lot in a lot of my businesses. I have one little cohort that's just like a wild card. Random ideas are good ideas. You never want to let something become a limiter. You want to fall in love with yes and instead of no.

Number six, consider but don't overthink media addressability. Media addressability, the total number of people you can reach in your ad targeting through paid advertising, is another factor to consider when defining who you want to be creative for. As you make content that overperforms organically, you might want to amplify some down the road and run them as paid social media ads. In that case, how would you target them? As platform algorithms continue to evolve, they continue to get better at automatically serving your ads to the best possible cohorts based on who they think will engage with it. You might think you're trying to reach 18 to 22-year-old males in Missouri who are interested in gaming, but platforms might pick up on the fact that you're getting higher watch time and conversions from a different segment that you may not have expected and serve your ads to them instead. This can happen both in organic content as well as paid advertising. Remember, even though you're creating all these narrow cohorts, when you're posting organically, you wouldn't be manually targeting them through the platform in any way. You'd be relying on the algorithm to help you find the right audience. Also, to remind you, a big reason to define cohorts with teeth in the first place is to give you a strong framework for your creative ideation to make unique content. It's not that you're only going to reach that audience and no one else. By defining narrow cohorts, your content is going to be more unique, sharper, more specific, and more relatable to different people. Too many people today make too much generic content, too much of the same stuff. By going narrow, you will win.

Let's say you have a local accounting firm and you noticed a lot of signups on your website after you posted a video titled 'Five Things Business Owners Don't Know About Taxes' on your Facebook page. When you amplify the video as a paid ad, instead of targeting business owners in your town, you could target everyone in your town and surrounding towns while trusting that the algorithm will optimize distribution and show your ad to the right people who will sign up on your website. The creative would remain the same. Your content would still technically be geared toward business owners, even though you're targeting broader. That way, you give yourself room for serendipity. You might find people that have a full-time job with a side hustle who watch your ad and sign up. Facebook may identify any number of variations of cohorts that want to consume your ad, cohorts that might not have been expected. However, there's no universal right answer on whether your media targeting should be narrow or broad. Depending on the platform, you could try both. For example, if you have a B2B SaaS company, SaaS stands for software as a service, by the way, you might want to define one of your cohorts as chief information officers at specific companies you're trying to reach. You can make content specifically for those organizations and use LinkedIn to run ads to executives at those companies with very specific narrow targeting. There might also be scenarios where you want to target people within your own audience, such as people from your consumer database or even who watch a certain percentage of your Instagram videos. As we'll explore later in the amplification section, different platforms have different levels of sophistication in their algorithm, which also plays a role.

Number seven, consider subcultures, stages of life people are at, affinities and passions, psychographics, cultural trends, and more. There are many ways to define cohorts. Age, geographic location, and interests are just a few of the many factors to consider. What about millennial parents working from home and feeling burnt out? What about graduating college students feeling anxious about entering the real world? What about 40 to 50-year-olds who reached a breaking point with their health and are committed to working out more? What about emerging trends around young people not drinking alcohol and preferring mocktails? Sorry, Dad. I had to put that in the book. My dad owns a liquor store. He's really upset about mocktails. This is where knowledge of cultural trends is required.

PAC, platforms and culture, the new requirement for your advertising knowledge. PAC refers to the knowledge that helps you make better, more strategic organic content. Let's break down both sides of it. Starting with culture. The culture side of platforms and culture can help you define cohorts, make relevant creative for them, and help inform your platform strategy. When I say culture, I don't just mean what's popular and trending now with urban hip hop or what the kids are into today. I mean, do you know how to speak to the narrow cohorts you're trying to reach? Do you know how to speak to, let's say, 40 to 47-year-old men living in the Midwest who like hunting and fishing? Do you know what trends they're paying attention to? Do you know what their common behaviors are as customers? Do you know how to get them to care about what you're selling? If you're running a billboard ad campaign, this would mean paying attention to what's happening in your town and seeing how you can incorporate those nuances into the ad. In the world of 1950s, 1960s, '70s TV commercials, that meant paying attention to the broader consumer interests, such as baseball, and incorporating those references into the commercial. On social, since we can make a high volume of content for low or even zero costs and for a variety of different cohorts, we have to have a nuanced understanding of what they're all paying attention to in culture. People often misunderstand this. Staying in tune with culture doesn't mean you need to dance on TikTok. If you're a B2B IT hardware company, you don't necessarily have to force a Drake reference into your content. But you could, by the way, that'd be weird and super cool, but like you could. It's more about understanding what's culturally relevant to your target audience. Maybe it's an old TV show they grew up watching in the '80s or '90s. Maybe it's tennis or golf or a hobby they picked up. Maybe it's a consumer behavior trend in the industry. Or maybe it's a trending meme or pop culture reference that's circulating around the internet.

By the way, one observation I see among some well-intended marketers and business people is that they think the people who make content relevant to a specific cohort are the people who look like the consumer cohort. I don't think that's necessarily true. I don't think a 40-year-old woman is the only person that knows how to sell to a 40-year-old woman. Similarly, I don't think 22-year-olds are necessarily better at social media strategy than 50-year-olds just because they grew up with it. I understand these points of view, but I hope you consider the alternative perspective, especially if you're looking to build your own marketing team. To gain insight into culture, you must pay attention to what I call signals. Signals are any data points or information that give you indications of what's relevant to a different consumer group. Signals could take many forms, including a consumer behavior or statistic, something a celebrity did, something an influencer did within cohorts you're looking at, news articles, emerging trends on advertising platforms or sites like Google Trends, tweets, articles or other content that sparks debate, research statistics about relevant topics, historical events. For example, as I'm recording this, there's a TikTok trend where people refer to canon events inspired by the film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Canon events refer to moments that everyone has to experience for themselves to build character or learn a life lesson. Here's an example from a creator. Everybody, there's a... this is in the book is where I have an image. You need to go to your QR code for the enhancements.

In this case, if you come across this trend, you could use it as an opportunity to showcase how well you understand your cohorts. What are the key life events for the people that you're trying to reach? What are the most common behaviors that these people can relate to? Can we weave your product or service in a way that's authentic? Another cultural observation you might have noticed based on news articles is that there's a growing number of people doing flexible gig work. As work moves beyond the 9-to-5 for a lot of people, they have more time during the day to browse social. You could use that data point to try out different platform strategies. Maybe it's a sign that people have more time throughout the day, which means you could try posting at midday, like 10:00 a.m. to 2 p.m., and compare that to other time slots. As we'll cover more in the post-creative strategy section, you might find trending meme videos or audio on various platforms that you can adapt into your content when you're scrolling through content yourself. In the enhancement is a QR code that links to a screenshot posted by a physical therapist who layered on his own messaging over a popular video of a hamone artist, Steve Hickman. The video received 26.5 million views at the time of this recording. Notice how the headline of the text, 'After you turn 30 and the PT asks you to point to where it hurts,' directly calls out a cohort of people over 30 who are starting to feel the effects of their lifestyle on their bodies. Adding titles that speak directly to your cohort group and calls them out literally is a good way to capture attention and make it relevant in the first few seconds. By the way, when layering your content over memes, remember two things. Number one, give credit to the original poster in the copy or the person featured in a video to the best of your ability. And number two, layer your own branding over the video so that when it's shared, viewers have a way to associate the message to your brand. This could be your logo, your reaction in the form of a TikTok duet or an Instagram remix or something else. When you're looking into cultural trends, think of an authentic way that your brand can cross over and participate. Wendy's did a good job with showcasing a photo of their strawberry frosty and calling it Straw Barbie Frosty in the copy of the tweet given all the hype around Barbie in the summer of 2023.

If you're a B2B organization or an executive, you can pay attention to the news trends in your industry or current events related to the area of expertise and talk about it. You can use platforms to gather these events, too. For example, you can tap into LinkedIn's suggested searches to see what people are searching for on the platform and their news section to see what people on the platform are talking about and could be relevant to your field. A lot of executives, service providers, and others are sometimes scared to tap into cultural trends or make content in general because they don't want their clients to take them less seriously. Many are worried about coming off as too gimmicky, cringy, or like just another content creator if they started using trending creative formats. I'm passionate about this because I've personally gone in directions with my personal content that others have been skeptical about. People have looked at me over the years and wondered, why is he talking about that? Why is he putting out content about this? People wonder if I'm hurting myself somehow by speaking about certain subject matters. The reality is, unless you're talking about something highly polarizing, most people don't give a crap. You may think you look silly by using a meme, a trending TikTok audio, or a green screen feature on platforms with you talking over an article that's screenshot in the background. But most viewers don't think of it that way. The number of people who will consume your culturally relevant content and think, 'I don't want to work with them,' is a very small percentage. On the flip side, people who would have otherwise never considered working with your law firm, your dentistry, or your nursery now consider it because you're more human. For every 1% of people who don't want to work with you after watching your video, maybe 5% will work with you. And by putting out more culturally relevant content, you're giving yourself a 4% more chance of opportunity. What most professionals have wrong is that they think 80% of the people will never want to work with them again for every 1% of opportunity they might get.

But here is an important note. If you're not funny by nature, don't force it. If you aren't chill and casual, don't force it. This is a game of authenticity. If you're actually uptight and super polished, then maybe you need to stay in that zone because this strategy will leave you vulnerable if you do it from a place of inauthenticity. Also, if you're authentically yourself, there are plenty of viewers who enjoy authentic stiff people or authentically awkward people. In fact, authentic awkward interviewers are emerging in social media as we're recording this book. On a similar note, I often hear from music artists who are aware about the potential of TikTok and other platforms, but they don't want to compromise their authenticity or creativity to get more views. They're worried that playing into trends may compromise who they are, their artistic style, and what got them there to the current level in the first place. If that's you, let me say this again. You don't need to compromise, nor do you need to make for trends or algorithms if it doesn't feel like you. Want to know why I say this? Because that's what I do. If you look at my content on TikTok, I'm not dancing or playing into trends 24/7. What I do is put out content at scale every day across all platforms on topics I want to be talking about and things I'm passionate about. That said, I'm always keeping an eye on trends and finding authentic places where I feel comfortable integrating them into my day-to-day content. I continue to challenge myself to be better at that.

For the artists in the scenario I just spoke about, even though you don't need to compromise, realize you can't exist in a 2024 world and beyond while thinking that the music is going to speak for itself. Record companies and audiences alike are looking for artists on social networks. It's what it is. You can be mad about it, but guess what? There were artists who were mad at TRL, that was the most important platform back in the day. There were artists that were mad at disc jockeys in certain radio stations when they were the most important. The reality is there are always platforms of the time that bring the most exposure and commercial success. If you're an artist or a creative person, that's good news. Social networks are the most merit-based system ever. The DJ doesn't have to like you. The executives at MTV don't have to like you. Carson Daly doesn't have to like you. The world just has to like you. But sitting at home and hoping that you can just put your music on Spotify and SoundCloud and call it a day is not a reality of the record business in the modern world. Ask yourself if leaning into cultural trends is truly inauthentic for you or if you're just scared to go there from an insecurity standpoint. You need to challenge yourself to put the concepts of this book into place while being authentic. That applies to everyone from content creators to small businesses to large brands.

There was a time when brands used to drive culture through their ads. In the days when people used to watch TV commercials at scale, Nike's 'Just Do It' and Wendy's 'Where's the Beef' ad from 1984 were memorable cultural defining moments. Today, it rarely happens. Of course, some of the biggest brands in the world manage to drive culture through widely used products. LVMH and Apple have products that play a key role in many people's lives and even their identities. Occasionally, brands drive culture through properly executed activations at an event like Formula 1 in Miami. But brands rarely drive culture through their advertising because most ads feel like bland TV commercials, even and especially when they're posted on social media. So, consumers scroll right past them. Today, in the new social media world, brands can drive culture, not only through relevant content, but also through collaborations and even developing unique collectible products. How would a brand go about driving culture through collectible items? Here's an example. Start by looking at your cohorts. Who are you trying to reach? If you're trying to reach 16 to 20-year-old young males to buy your product, have you thought about signing a deal with the most famous Twitch gamers to create their rookie cards? If you made a set of cards similar to what Capri Sun did with Nickelodeon back in 1991 and '92 and put your product into the packaging, you'd increase the likelihood that fans of those Twitch gamers could buy those products. You'd also broaden the product's appeal to collectors who want to buy cards of famous cultural figures. These are individuals who may buy your product to get the cards, use your product as a result, and purchase more later because they became fans of the product itself. Start with cohorts. Understand the cultural trends that the cohort is paying attention to. Make a relatable collectible. That could be a sneaker collaboration, a collectible toy, a one-off comic book, a collectible pin, a magnet, a collectible keychain, or even a digital collectible like a non-fungible token, aka an NFT.

Now that I've talked a little bit about the culture side of PAC, let's get into the P, platforms. When you gain platform knowledge, you become aware of the variety of different features that exist across TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. I'm really not calling it X. Sorry, Elon. You also get to know how to use the different features to create more awareness, engagement, and ultimately sales. For example, Facebook allows users to upload photos as replies in the comments. Using that observation, maybe you can add a CTA, a call to action, in the copy of your Facebook Reels, asking people to leave their own photo in the comments and build a more intimate community. When people leave a comment or engage with your post, it's a sign to the platform that people like watching or interacting with your content. Since the platform wants to keep people on the platform longer, it's more likely that your posts will be shown to them more often in the future or to other groups of people who may also be interested in watching. It could also be an opportunity to get user-generated content that you could repost in different formats, such as re-sharing those images on your Facebook or Instagram stories with your message layered on top of it. Use the QR code in the enhancement to see how a creator generated photo replies in Facebook Reels comments using a combination of in-app music and strong text call to actions in the video.

Another way to uncover popular creative formats is by paying attention to what the platform is prompting you to do. When scrolling on a platform, you might see a screen that prompts you to use a particular feature or try a new creative format. The prompt: 'Add a sunset pic to your video.' I'm going to go off script right now, everybody. There's an image in the book when you have the hard copy. Make sure you get the hard copy, by the way. Just listening on audio here. You know, I really think you need the hard copy. This is what you call a right hook, Dustin. This is a flat-out right hook. As a matter of fact, let's double up my right hook. It should be apparent to you at this point that you should buy this book for every single person you've ever met in your life that likes marketing or needs marketing. And if you're a big boss and you have people in a marketing department, buy a copy for each of them. Anyway, in the book right now, there's a slide that a lot of you probably saw because Instagram was really pushing it. It says, 'Add a sunset pic or video.' This is just kind of like how these platforms will continue to prompt you. If you see little pop-ups, like I think a lot of you know what this is. When you're in social, you see little prompts. As a marketer or business person, start paying attention because if they're prompting a certain thing, you probably want to start doing those things because that means they're giving more organic reach to it. I'm sure I say this in the rest of the book, but I'll keep going.

The prompt 'Add a sunset pic or video' appeared while scrolling on the Instagram Reels tab. It refers to the Add Your sticker, a sticker through which users can add their own videos or pictures that relate to different generic prompts such as 'What emojis did you use?' or 'Show us your prom look.' When clicking on more prompts in the screen, this is what you'll see. Now, again, what we're showing here is like what people added to the prompt. This gets a little technical. This is where the audiobook on a book like this has its challenges, but I'll try to walk you through this. If you're scrolling and you see something like that, you could come up with maybe a few different hypotheses. Maybe Instagram wants more people to use the Add Your sticker. Maybe Instagram will reward accounts that use that sticker with more reach and awareness. Let me tell you right now, it's not a maybe, it's definitely. If a platform prompts you to do something, I'm telling you right now, do it. You will get more organic reach, which is, if you haven't figured out yet, one of the most important battlegrounds for every marketer and small business in the world. Maybe it's an indicator that they want people to use an in-app creative feature. Whether those hypotheses end up being right or wrong, it would be a smart idea to experiment with it yourself.

When you scroll through your TikTok feed, you might notice some videos that have the words 'CapCut, try this template' above the username at the time of this recording. As you begin to see more and more of these videos, you should think about why they're being surfaced more often. If you do more research, you'll find out that TikTok and CapCut, a video editing app, are both owned by the same parent company, and they've been integrated into each other. CapCut can help users create content with more speed and less overwhelm. As TikTok wants more users to create content on the platform, it makes sense that they might surface more videos created by CapCut. If you were to use CapCut templates in your TikTok videos, that might help your videos get organic distribution. That is the thought process that is required. Here are a few points to keep in mind to help you gain platform knowledge. Number one, take account of all the features a platform has. At the most basic level, do you understand that you can do a duet and a stitch on TikTok? Do you know that YouTube comments can link directly to a timestamp in the video? Do you know how long an Instagram Reel can be compared to a Spotlight Snap? Spend the time to play with each platform and see all that you can do.

Number two, remember the platform just wants you to stay on longer. Every platform just wants to keep its users on longer, which is the ultimate goal of all these features and updates. When you make content that people want to watch, consume, and engage with, you will be rewarded with more reach. If you post a two-hour podcast interview on YouTube, it could still get a substantial amount of views and engagement for your business if the content is engaging enough. On the flip side, a short five-second video with long engaging text placed over it might also overindex in distribution if people are watching the video multiple times just to read the text, signaling to the platform that it might be a good video if people are watching it repeatedly. This is why there's no standard right answer to how long your content should be. It only matters whether people want to watch it. Sometimes people who are new to making content will think that they're shadowbanned by the platform if they aren't getting a lot of views. But more often than not, their content just isn't good enough, so the platform doesn't serve it to more people.

Number three, pay attention to what is unique. What kinds of features does the platform have that few other or no other platforms have? For example, no other platform in this book besides Instagram lets users pin up to three comments in the comment section at the time of this recording. Also, at the time of this recording, when users swipe past the last slide of a TikTok carousel in the For You page, it leads to the poster's profile, which is different than how Instagram carousels work. They don't allow users to swipe past the last tile. Pay attention to features on the platform that you don't see anywhere else. This can help inform what your content ideation should look like. For example, maybe the call to action on the last tile of your Instagram carousel could be 'Leave a comment' or 'Share with a friend.' But on TikTok, you could try a 'Swipe to follow me' CTA to see if that works.

Number four, pay attention to what's similar across all platforms. At the time of this recording, all the platforms in this book besides LinkedIn already have some version of their own video feed like TikTok's For You page. By the way, what's so fun is even in between writing this book and recording this, as I just told you earlier, if you were paying attention, now LinkedIn is testing its version as well. This is why day trading matters. It changes in the days and weeks, not in the years. YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram all have a scrubbing feature so users can fast forward into the video. Facebook currently only uses this for its long-form videos, not Reels. Platform similarities can also give an indication to what their goals are, where they might be headed, and what behaviors they may or may not be trying to incentivize. You might be able to even implement similar tactics across platforms if you know what the similarities are. For example, 81st Street Deli does a great job showcasing their viral TikTok videos as pinned posts on their profile, but there's a missed opportunity in doing the same on Instagram. On TikTok, their pinned videos feature trending food items from their menu. That way, when users land on their profile, they'll immediately see what they're known for. However, Instagram also allows profiles to select and pin at the top. They could potentially do the same, assuming they were posted contextually as Instagram Reels, or create a separate video manifesto of what their business is about and what content people can expect to find on their page. Another opportunity here is adding one or more links to their Instagram bio that point to areas they want to drive traffic to, and utilizing Instagram's unique highlights feature as well. Using highlights, they could feature popular menu items, comments, or videos from their community about those items or the interior of their deli to give people a more thorough overview of who they are.

Going to go off script here for what I just said. I was analyzing this deli and it was just like very clear that they were more native to TikTok, but they didn't understand all the options they had on Instagram. That's why I laid it out in the book here. It's a very, very big deal. So many of you right now are only comfortable on one or two platforms. When you're done with this book, my biggest goal is that you take seriously four, five, six, seven different platforms because every platform that you're not going hard at is a missed opportunity. And at the end of the day, creating demand for your business, selling deli sandwiches, sneakers, getting babysitting gigs, selling records, whatever you do, everybody in the world, nonprofit donations, leaving opportunities on the table that are out there for free. Let me just go on this rant right now. Posting on social networks is free. Free. There's no other advertising medium in the world that is free. Obviously, you can run ads on social, but posting organically is free. And so many of you are missing that. Let's keep it going.

Number five, notice how similar user behaviors show up differently on different platforms. On LinkedIn, when a user likes a comment on a post, it will resurface in the post on their connections' and followers' feeds. When a user likes or comments on an Instagram post, it doesn't directly show up in their followers' feed again in the same way. These kind of differences will impact how you make and distribute content. For example, maybe you could put an extra focus on creating business or career related discussions in your comment section on LinkedIn given the greater distribution that comments will get you.

Number six, stay up to date on new tests that platforms are running. Platforms are always testing new features. Currently, YouTube is testing an AI-powered multi-language voiceover dubbing tool. There are indications that other platforms are testing versions of AI chatbots and related features. Paying attention to these tests might give you an indication of the direction that the platforms are heading.

Number seven, consider the psychology of the user when they're using the platform. LinkedIn started out as a job search tool many years ago and still carries that DNA. When people are browsing through LinkedIn, they're in a business and career state of mind. When those same people are browsing Facebook, they might be in the mindset of seeing what their high school or college friends are up to. When they're scrolling through TikTok, they might be in a light-hearted, casual mood. Each platform has its own context, which impacts how the piece of content is being consumed. I'm going off script here. This is huge. Think of yourself right now. Again, I know so many of you are listening to this working out, driving, walking a dog, that whole thing. So, just take a chill pill for a second. I need you to pay attention. By the way, the chill pill recall, that was very 1993. You as a human, when you are on LinkedIn, think about how you are versus how you are when you're on Instagram or TikTok or Twitter. There's different versions of you. If you make content that understands that, you will overindex. I use different words and have a different tone and tenor and use different content on LinkedIn because I know it's business time. Whereas I don't post my garage sale videos on LinkedIn, but I do that on TikTok because that's entertainment. That's almost more like television. And I could, and I might occasionally, but I promise you the copy would be different. The copy on LinkedIn might be very different, of like 'Looking for a side hustle,' versus the copy on TikTok might be like, 'Hey kids, want to make a couple bucks this weekend?' Very different. Keep that in mind.

Number eight, be a practitioner, not a headline reader. My plea is that you do social media, not just listen about it. Whether you're a 22-year-old creator trying to build a brand around yourself, whether you're a 52-year-old owner of a small business in your town, or an executive at a corporation, you have to be the practitioner. The only way to get good at this stuff is to make content, post it, and learn from it.

you're playing around with various platforms and taking account of what features and creative units they have, you can reference this broad overview across platforms at the time of this recording by checking out the key creative units across platforms chart in the enhancement. Some details in the chart might still be the same at the time that you're listening to this, and some platforms may have added new features and things may have changed. My hope is that you use the chart as a guide on the kinds of things you should be noticing as you're playing with different platforms, and use that knowledge to inform how you make your strategic organic content. Now it's your turn. Take your own time to audit each platform at the time that you're listening to this, and fill out the worksheet that you can find in the enhancement with a pen or a marker. You can figure out what each platform's current features and capabilities are.

Strategic organic content, SOCK, what good modern advertising looks like. Over the next decade, the best communicators in the world will be the ones who are most talented at understanding how platforms work and understanding cultural nuances of hundreds of different consumer segmentations. PAC is the foundation of that, and SOCK helps you put PAC knowledge into practice. I have no idea why I've gone dramatic, but this is what you're going to get on the audiobook. We're keeping that in. Strategic organic content is meant to build brand, grow communities, and create relevance. In the current social media landscape, it refers to organic content that you post across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok. It's a framework for how to make creative that people want to consume. The concept applies across many forms of advertising. Advertisers on television, radio, and outdoor media also have to know what strategic content looks like in those mediums. Advertisers have to know what the first few seconds in their commercial should look like and sound like so that you turn around from doing your dishes and look at the television. They have to know what the call to action should be, like on a radio ad that people will remember as they're driving. The same concept applies on social media. It just happens that with the number of social media platforms that exist today, there are far more variables to consider when making strategic organic content compared to making a strategic billboard or a strategic commercial. The bottom line is, being a good advertiser on social media is harder than being a good advertiser in traditional marketing.

This is the biggest thing that Fortune 500 companies have upside down. Often, when I look at internal teams at brands and small businesses across the board, I notice some are going through the motions with their social media content. Some direct-to-consumer brands — by the way, that refers to brands that sell their products direct to consumers, usually online, without going through a retailer or a middleman — these direct-to-consumer brands want to be sales-oriented, and so that's the way they approach their creative. Other times, small business owners just delegate their social media strategy to their 22-year-old niece or nephew, and the owners themselves aren't evaluating it or don't even know how. Fortune 500 companies will often enforce their brand guidelines on every piece of content, which makes their content less interesting and less relevant. In many cases, they tend to bring television and print and outdoor advertising mindsets to social media platforms. That's why I put the S in SOCK. Your content must be strategic. If you want to build a brand and grow sales, you can't just post content for the sake of posting it. Using your cultural insights and platform knowledge, SOCK is about knowing how to make content specific for LinkedIn versus Facebook versus TikTok versus every other platform. How should your videos look on each platform? What should your image and carousels look like? What trending audio should you attach to your videos to increase watch time and sharability? What time should you post? How much copy should support it? What does the thumbnail look like? What does the first three seconds look and sound like? How do you incentivize people to hit the share button on a platform to create more awareness? SOCK and PAC are about practicing creative and platform strategy at a PhD level. When done properly, SOCK helps you do a few things. Number one, you build brand and relevance from day one.

When I talk about posting a high volume of content, one of the biggest misconceptions that people have is that I'm asking them to spray and pray, test and learn, or throw against a wall and see what sticks. What I absolutely believe is in learning from what you post. I don't love phrases like test and learn because it undervalues the power of SOCK. I'm going to take a little side break here. I know I've referenced it a bunch, but if you're like me, sometimes you forget stuff. Again, SOCK stands for strategic organic content. These are your social media posts. It leads some brands to treat social media as less valuable than other platforms. I prefer to think of SOCK as marketing for the sake of better marketing. You post relevant content for your specific cohorts that can build brand on their own. But with the learnings you can get from producing such a high volume of content, you're able to do even better marketing through future content. That includes learning from quantitative data and analytics, but also qualitative data from comments section insights.

I don't want you to try to build your business based off a lightning bolt model. In other words, don't spend all your time and resources on one piece of content trying to get it right, hoping to strike gold. Instead, try to put out four or five social media posts across each platform every day to give yourself more chances to have something hit. The more content you're able to put out, the better. If you're trying to get better at tennis, practicing five days a week will improve your game more than if you practice once a week. Each piece of content will help inform and refine your broader strategy. This is why I always tell people to hold off on saying their strategy isn't working until they've been putting out content for 50 to 100 days. You can't just post four times on YouTube and give up because your shorts get 20 views each. When you're more relevant, then you'll be more top of mind for your customers or clients when they need what you're selling. This helps your sales-focused paid advertising campaigns convert more effectively at lower costs. With the way the algorithms work now, relevance impacts reach. If your content is contextual and relevant to a specific cohort, then the platform will surface that content to more people within that cohort as well as people outside that cohort that might be interested.

The immediate goal with SOCK isn't always sales. Although some of the content may be more focused on your product or services than others, you'd be surprised how SOCK can drive sales on its own. And it definitely will help inform you on actual paid advertising campaigns and what they should look like. Number two, you can turn your best-performing content into performance ads to drive sales. With the TikTokification of social media, every platform is moving in the direction of the interest graph, which means your content might get 17 views if it doesn't resonate. But if it does, it might get 1 million, regardless of the number of followers you have. If you have a piece of strategic organic content that overperforms compared to the average of your account, you will have proof that people resonated with it. Then you can take that piece of content and tweak it a little. If you're a personal trainer and you have an Instagram reel that overperformed, you could tweak your copy and say something like, "If you're interested in personal training in [insert your city], please email me at [insert your email]," and run it as an Instagram ad within a five-mile radius of your town. This way, you mitigate the risk of your paid advertising by using content that already has proven to work through natural social media algorithms.

I'm going to go off script here. I need everybody to hear this very loud and clear. Organic social that goes viral or significantly overindexes your normal organic reach is something every one of you needs to contemplate taking, slightly tweaking to make it more sales-oriented, and running $100 or $200 worth of advertising against to see if it converts. This is one of the biggest opportunities for everybody listening, especially small, tiny businesses, where for three or four hundred bucks you can get sales and really start to build your business. Number three, you can make higher-production commercials with proven insights. When brands and agencies do advertising research, it usually comes in the forms of focus groups or studying industry research reports. With the volume of content that can be put out across platforms, we can gather research data points at a higher rate than ever before. Instead of using a series of small focus groups to guess what kind of commercials we should spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on, we can collect data from SOCK and see what kinds of messages resonate. For example, Starbucks put out a tweet highlighting a relatable scenario for part of their consumer base. It reads, "Little Miss shows up late with iced coffee." If this tweet did well compared to their average performance numbers or the quality of replies, Starbucks could decide to expand on it through short-form videos that they post across advertising platforms. For example, a quick search on TikTok along with the same theme, showing up late with coffee, pulls up a few short-form videos with titles like, "POV: that employee that's always late but shows up with coffee," "Me showing up to class two hours late with iced coffee," and "Showing up late as f to work with a coffee," and more. Maybe they could combine their tweet theme with some of these video formats and create some short videos titled "Little Miss shows up late to work with iced coffee" or "Little Miss shows up late to the family reunion with iced coffee," based on common scenarios people might find themselves in. If these clips happen to be broadly relatable, they could put even more resources behind this concept and turn it into a long-form, higher-production skit, maybe getting some influencers involved. By the time they decide to produce that skit and amplify it across things like YouTube and connected TV or standard television commercials, they would have gathered data that proved customers care about this message. They would have minimized the risk before investing those tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is how a simple post on Twitter can be the seed that leads to a high-budget advertising campaign. The more SOCK you put out, the better insights you'll have. You'll get a sense of what content resonates, how effectively to use platform features, and you'll learn how to make your next piece of content better than the one before it. There's no permanent right answer to what the best practices are on advertising platforms because things shift and change so much. That's why you should be posting as much as humanly possible so you can uncover new learnings as they happen.

Consider the following points as you're making SOCK for your personal brand, business, your clients, or the company you're working for. Number one, does your content feel like an ad? When companies think of what their LinkedIn posts should look like, many of them immediately go to a PR-driven mindset and default into promoting what their company is doing instead of actually providing value. This post from Gong approaches things differently. See on the right. If you're listening right now, as I know you are, this is the visual from the book, so I'll try to walk it through for you here. The first two lines of the copy immediately address the intended audience. MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS, all in caps. As a leader, it's part of your job to establish emotional stability. The headline of the image is "Mental health is a challenge for sellers." So immediately this applies both to leaders in the organization as well as some junior salespeople who might be brave enough to engage with the content, which means their managers may see it given how LinkedIn's algorithms work. The presentation of the data in a graph-style format is also native to the psychology of the LinkedIn audience when they're on the platform. They're in a business, sales, or overall professional mindset. It's a visual piece of content that brings value by providing information without overly promoting the company. In fact, the company name is weaved into the graph in a subtle, smart way near the bottom. The dimensions of the image are also maximized to the amount of space taking up in the feed, which helps boost engagement in some cases. When clicking "see more" and expanding the text, this is what we see. And you see a bunch of copy. Everybody who's listening here, we see more details around the context of the graph, the stats, and the tactical piece of advice for leaders that are broken up in an easy-to-read format. Again, providing value to their audience around a common topic many of them might be thinking about. Some potential ways to improve might be the following. What about changing the colors on the graph for easier readability? What about making the title larger on the graph? Could that catch more people's attention while they're scrolling? What about adding a call to action at the end of the copy or leaving the first comment from the company account or an executive from the company to create more engagement on the post? Would all of this result in greater reach? The first two lines of the copy convey a strong point of view, but another way to approach it might have been adding a cliffhanger at the end of line two to incentivize people to click "see more," that button you see on LinkedIn posts which expands the copy.

If you're a B2B company putting out content on LinkedIn, the best advice I have is to pretend to be the B2B magazine of your industry. Pretend your organization is the host of a show related to the subject matter on a serious radio show, and your goal is to get the best ratings. Instead of trying to promote your business in every post, make content that people in your cohort categories will be interested in. The best part is, in the B2B world, you don't need hundreds of thousands of views on your content. If you're making content for decision-makers in the IT sector, maybe a couple hundred views from people in those roles are enough to generate the return on investment. A strategy I always recommend to B2B organizations or service providers is to invite your target decision-makers to be guests on your podcast. This has a few benefits. Number one, you'll be able to build relationships with potential customers that may lead to sales in the long term. Number two, after six months of doing this, potential customers that you'd normally reach out to are now reaching out to you to be on the podcast. Number three, the podcast is content that you can post across platforms. You can cut up clips from that podcast, post it organically, and take the ones that perform well and run those as ads on LinkedIn against your target consumer base.

What does the right hook of your video look like? The hook is the first thing that users see when they're scrolling and they come across your content. If you're posting a video, then the hook is everything that appears in the first three seconds or so. That includes the title, the thumbnail, any captions you might use, the opening line, the character or person in the video, and the overall design and format of the post. If you're posting an image, consider what colors are most prominent, what words are largest, and other elements that will catch the viewer's eyes. Out of all the variables, the hook is one of the most important ones because it dictates the first impression of your content. This is where you either catch people's attention or let them scroll past. Most of us don't sit on the couch anymore with the remote in our hands, bound by the TV guide schedule with only a few channels to choose from. We live in a world where there's an obnoxious amount of information getting thrown at us, which means if you're not catching people's eyes in the first second or two, they're going to scroll to the next piece of content in their feed. The hook is the part where the audience decides if the piece of content is relevant to them or not.

Check out this TikTok video, for example, by using the QR code in the enhancement. There are multiple variables here that help create an engaging hook. One, the green screen video effect. Green screen effect allows creators to add their commentary or reaction on top of either a picture or video in the background. In this case, the creator used TikTok's native duet feature, which allows you to post your video in combination with another video from another account in various formats, and selected green screen as the format to duet. This means the video is playing in the background with the creator's face in the corner providing commentary over it. This format helps create an eye-catching hook that makes viewers curious about what the creator is going to say. I also think the green screen format is a great one because it allows people to comment over headlines, articles, and screenshots of other posts that may be relevant to what your consumers care about. It can be an easy way to make content. If you're a real estate professional, chances are you have some opinions about the current interest rates or home buying trends in your area. You could find a relevant article that talks about those things with an intriguing title and layer on a green screen with your opinion. If you want more distribution on special press releases and announcements your company makes, you can green screen it for extra distribution instead of just posting that content on your blog and letting it sit there.

Number two, title and first three seconds of the video. The title, "Where is the surgeon hiding?" along with the creator saying, "Where is the surgeon?" out loud in the first few seconds of the video, creates curiosity. Adding a title that asks a thought-provoking or interesting question like this might lead to more users staying on the video to find the answers. In this example, the readability of the title might also be something to improve. The white text against the green background might not have been as readable as, say, using TikTok's in-app feature to add a black background behind the white text so it's a bit more readable. This is where things get subjective. Just because you or I or someone in the organization likes a particular color doesn't mean that that color is the one that will catch the most attention. In this scenario, maybe the creator could try multiple different colors in the headlines, post all the variations, and see which one actually ends up working best. In the first few frames of the video, there's also a slight pause before the creator starts talking. The first frame of the video appears as a static image rather than immediately focusing on the main point of the video. The first few seconds of a video are too valuable to waste with slow starts or extra frames that aren't 100% necessary. It's best to get to the message as fast as possible, otherwise you'll lose viewers.

The first three seconds are critical to how relevant your video feels to your intended audience. This is the place to feature actors or actresses who look like the people you want to reach, add thought-provoking headlines, or add movement and camera angles that make people curious about what the video is going to say. Number three, the sound. Native TikTok audio involving the Mission: Impossible theme song was added here and is playing in the background as the creator is talking. The familiarity of this song is a good way to catch the attention and help the distribution of the video. If TikTok sees that a lot of people are watching videos with that audio attached, then it's potentially more likely they'll give more favorable distribution to other videos that have the same audio. With certain platforms today, you also have the option to repost a piece of content with new edits. Once you see how it does the first time around, you can change one variable — the title, the hook, the overall video format, or anything else — then repost it and see how it does. This might work better on some platforms than others. Sometimes your content is being shown predominantly to your followers. Showing the same piece of content to them within a short time frame, even with slight tweaks, might limit performance. Some platforms will show you what percentage of your viewers were followers versus non-followers, and you can use that data to inform your strategy.

Here, when it comes to video formats and styles, it's tempting for brands to keep the same style across their content to stay consistent with their brand guidelines. For example, Athletic Greens had a smart strategy partnering with Dr. Andrew Huberman for a content series. However, their Instagram reels all have a similar design which shows Dr. Huberman on the right side in all of their thumbnails. If they repeatedly use this format as part of their hook because of the actual data that show that this design increased performance, then it's an appropriate strategy. However, a lot of brands tend to sacrifice performance, engagement, and relevance because they make what they want to make rather than what consumers want to see. Usually, this means creating strict guidelines around things like logo placement, colors, how the product is used, and other things that consumers don't care about.

Next, do people spend time watching and interacting with your content? Today, we have unparalleled access to data on how people are consuming our content. Back when I ran a full-page ad in The New York Times for Wine Library, I couldn't see exactly how many people saw it and actually consumed it. If a brand is running a TV commercial, they might have a guess for what the potential reach is, but they don't know how many people actually saw it and paid attention unless they use creative attribution methods like a QR code or special phone number as part of their call to action. Now, every social media platform provides analytics on how many people are consuming your content. And this quantitative data is an important part of your feedback loop to make even better content the next time around. If you post something on TikTok, you can get insights on average watch time, percentage of viewers who watched the full video, number of new followers you got from that piece of content, and more. This feedback lets you ask smart questions. Why is one piece of content getting more followers than another piece of content? Why are some of your videos getting more people to watch to the end? Is it the topic? Is it the creative format? Is it the copy that makes people watch? You might not be 100% sure of these answers, but that's okay. As long as you have a hypothesis, you can continue to try things. At the time of this recording, YouTube provides some of the most thoughtful analytics out there of any platform in the book. You can see audience retention graphs for long-form videos on YouTube Analytics, which can help you find out which moments in your long-form video people are resonating with the most, based on which parts of the video get the most replays or shares.

Next, does your content evoke emotion and tell a story? If you tell your story properly, your audience will be willing to sit down and pay attention to you for longer than they normally would. A common misconception is that your content has to be short to capture attention. The reality is we live in a world where so many people binge-watch Game of Thrones and Stranger Things for hours and hours on the weekend. People will sit and have a Marvel movie marathon and spend an entire day watching films back to back. They'll also scroll past a 30-second YouTube short if it's not engaging. It's not about the length of your content. It's about how good your content is. I'm going to repeat that for the kids in the back. It is not about the length of your content. It's about how good your content is. When you make content, make it for the person who's consuming it, not for yourself. What you make needs to be either informative, thought-provoking, entertaining, or a mix of multiple different elements. Once you catch attention with a strong hook, are you keeping their attention throughout the length of your video? What is their incentive to watch till the 30-second mark, the one-minute mark, the three-minute mark?

Next, is your content native to the platform? Once you have a sense of who you are making the content for, you need to understand how to make content within the creative units. An important part of this is using each platform's features in a way that leverages their unique capabilities. Think of it this way. All of us act differently when we're in a boardroom versus when we're on a trip to Vegas with our closest friends. We act differently with our family than with our co-workers. Being native to the platform is no different than being aware of the context of the room that you're in. You'd want to make your content blend into the platform as much as possible. If you're running ads on Hulu, you might think about making it similar to the shows you're running the ads on. If you're running radio ads, that would mean incorporating jingles and music similar to the radio station that you're running ads on.

Notice how Brit.co uses Instagram carousels to display a decision tree across multiple carousel types. See on the next page — you won't be able to see this since we're reading, but I'll explain it. Oh, by the way, full disclosure, I'm an investor in Brit.co. Big shout out to Brit Morin. The first tile asks a question and serves as the hook, enticing people to swipe based on their answer. The decision tree expands into many different options as users keep sliding and ends with a wholesome message. Notice that this first tile, there's a little hint through the design of the image, and there's continuation in tile two and beyond. It reminds users that the post is a carousel and there's more to swipe through, as sometimes in-feed graphics can be mistaken for standalone images as users scroll fast in feed. The carousel is also culturally relevant for the time it was posted — in this case, Mother's Day — and hits on a common emotion and pain point that certain people have around holidays when they have challenges with their family situation. If the carousel performed worse than Brit.co's usual numbers, they could tweak the format in the future by trying any number of things. For example, they could try designing the entire flowchart in one image instead of multiple so that it quickly can be consumed through a glance instead of multiple swipes.

When making content native to a platform, there are a few elements to consider. Number one, what sizes and dimensions are you working with? For example, on Instagram, the snapshot of your video as it appears on your profile grid is only a portion of your full vertical video at the time of this recording. If you're reposting a TikTok video to Instagram, one of the tweaks you might make is adding a specifically designed Instagram thumbnail as it's the first frame in your video where the key elements are placed within the dimensions necessary to show up on your grid. Number two, are you using the platform's in-app features? This is one of the easier ways to make your content native to a platform. If you're posting a video clip, you can use in-app features across the platform to add a title to your video. That way, the video leverages design and features that are unique to the platform. Snapchat, for example, lets users add text to a thin black bar within the app, a format that's unique to the platform. Instagram and TikTok both allow you to add polls to your videos, for example, but the polls aren't designed in the same way. Every platform has a number of these in-app features that make them different from the others.

Number three, does your copy reference contextual elements from the platform? People tend to overlook the importance of copy when making content, but this is where you have the opportunity to address your viewers directly. You could say things like, "Hey Instagram," or "Hey Facebook," at the beginning of your copy to call out those users, or reference specific calls to action. On Instagram, you say, "Share this with your friends." But on LinkedIn, you'd say, "Send this to your colleague," since that's what LinkedIn calls their share feature at the time of recording this book. On Instagram, you'd say, "Save this post." But on Twitter, you'd say, "Bookmark this." If you're using your own audio on a Facebook or Instagram reel that feels inspirational, funny, motivational, or any kind of other audio that people can add to their reels, you can say something like, "Make a reel using this audio" in the copy.

Number four, are you using cultural trends within each platform? Chipotle, in this example, repurposes a TikTok for its Instagram reel. See the QR code in the enhancement for the link to this image. It was the same video with the same copy, but the trending sound they used in the background for this short looping video was different on each platform. I often get asked whether it's okay to post the same exact piece of content across multiple platforms to increase output and save time. I don't love this approach because people use it as an excuse to copy and paste creative across all the platforms. There are too many contextual nuances from platform to platform, and blind copying and pasting means you're leaving the opportunity for relevance and distribution on the table. There are always small tweaks you can make, even if it's just the copy or the audio you use in the background. My team does have a content repurposing strategy where we'll sometimes use the same piece of content and distribute it across multiple platforms. But I know if I made a video specifically for Facebook, it would perform better than something that was repurposed somewhere else.

I'm going to go off script here. And me and my team, when we're at our best, and either I'm not being lazy or they're not just mailing it in, we are tweaking that video slightly for every platform. And the copy for sure is different.

Next, are you putting out enough volume of content? Two partners walked up to me at VCON 2023 and told me, "We want to change the world." I loved it and said, "Good." After exchanging some warm feelings and shaking hands, I asked them how many times they were posting content. They told me they were working really hard and that they added another person to their team. I pushed back and said, "How much content are you putting out?" They replied, "Not enough." For the third time, I asked, "How much content are you putting out?" Eventually, they told me the truth. They were publishing one post a week.

By the way, going off script, I know a lot of you saw this. Dustin's in the background filming right now. He's laughing. That post went very viral. I have a lot of love for those two. I love every business owner and creator or leader that has big ambitions. I hear from a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners who aspire to be billionaires, or artists that aspire to be the next Drake. When I ask them how much content they're putting out to bring awareness around their mission, the answer is always too little. With those two who walked up to me at VCON, I pulled out my phone and filmed a piece of content with them right then and there, prompting them to talk about some of the key points around what they were up to. You can watch the interaction at garyvee.com. That's garyvee.com/quitoverthinking. I think it will help a lot of you. I need a lot of you to go and do that. garyvee.com/quitoverthinking.

People always get into the quality versus quantity debate when it comes to content. To me, the answer is both. It's always both. But putting out more quantity is what gives you an indication to what quality actually is. The more formats you put out, the more consumer segmentations you make content for, the more insights you get from what's resonating. Does a short looping video perform better on Twitter than a GIF? I know it's jif, but I'm staying with GIF. Of the same looping video, does a status update on LinkedIn perform better than putting up the same quote in a native template in-app, making it appear more like a graphic? What platform drives the most link clicks for you when you link to an external URL? You won't know the answer to these questions unless you post a variety of different types of content across platforms at a high volume. Even though I believe creative quality is the variable of success, it's the quantity execution that's the opportunity to figure out what quality is.

And no, you're not oversaturating the feed or annoying people by posting more. Most of your content isn't even being seen because of the number of apps out there and the number of distractions available in everyone's day-to-day life. Some people make the mistake of thinking that their content will perform better if they post less. If that's you, I would challenge you to take a deeper look at the numbers. In many cases, people get, let's say, 1,000 views on a post if you're posting once a day. And that might drop down to 500 per post when you're posting four times a day. But even though the reach per post is lower, you're still getting 2,000 views a day versus 1,000 with the higher quantity. The results might differ based on platform, but make sure you measure instead of guessing. Bottom line, post more.

Is your copy optimized for the platform? As people increasingly use platforms like TikTok and Instagram as search engines, the copy — or the caption, as some say — on your post plays a huge role. The creator in the following video received 12.9 million views at the time of this recording. Again, for everyone listening, go to your QR codes or do what my mom wants you to do, which is to buy the physical book. She's a big fan of me and wants me to have both the audio and the physical book. It's an 11-second video that starts with "POV: you're feeling lazy and you don't feel like doing anything," which is relatable for a large group of people, and ends with a CTA to read the caption where there's a longer copy elaborating on the solution to the problem. If done right, your copy can be a big primary driver of your content's distribution. Your copy can be a place where you can add additional context around your piece of content and build on it further. You could reference the cohorts you're trying to reach by starting with lines like, "For all the dads out there," or add a curiosity-provoking line that keeps people watching to the end. Platforms across the board continue to expand the character limits for copy at the time of this recording, which is a sign that they appreciate the greater length and value that it adds to the content. If you're a songwriter, you could take advantage of text-only posts on Facebook and LinkedIn, long-form posts on Twitter, YouTube community tab posts, and maxing out the character limit on Instagram and TikTok.

Before I move on, copy, copy, copy. So many of you are so visual and so videoed out, we continue to underestimate copy. Please lean in. It's a big, big deal.

What does your profile hygiene look like before you start posting content? It's important to make sure that your profile is set up in the right way. So when viewers click through to your profile after watching your video, they know exactly who you are and what you do. For example, ATL Mixers did a great job with this TikTok video on the next page. They used a catchy audio in its background. They showed the process of making a summer drink, a topic that would be top of mind for people in July when this was posted. Videos that show the process of making something — a drink, a recipe, a special kind of food — are interesting for people to watch because they want to see the outcome. In this case, ATL Mixers got 19.9 million views on the video at the time of this recording. However, the link in bio doesn't go to their website. It goes to their Instagram page. On their Instagram page, they have a short bio explaining what they do and an Instagram highlights feature of a couple of client reviews, but they don't have a website link in their bio or a phone number. If somebody wanted to hire them for a private event, what would they do? Sign up for the website? Message them on Instagram? There's no obvious call to action of what to do. And while there was undoubtedly some TikTok viewers who would have hired them on the spot, it wasn't clear. A better strategy would have been to link to the website on their TikTok bio with a form to fill out and a phone number to call. They could have done the same on their Instagram page in addition to using the highlights feature to showcase other parts of their business, such as footage from events they've done in the past or short videos of top drink recipes.

This is a classic example of missed opportunities when you don't optimize every angle. The reason this book is going so deep is that there are so many little details that make for the full picture. I couldn't explain to you the potential revenue loss that ATL Mixers missed out on by not maximizing their profile during this viral moment. You should make sure that people can easily see who you are, what you do, and have a chance to take a call to action. Whether that's clicking a link to your website or calling a phone number or an important action that you'd like them to take, it's our job as operators to eliminate friction for users who want to do things with us.

Next, are you showing different sides of yourself, your brand, or your business? I often notice business people post a lot of technical how-to videos related to their products or services, but don't share as much about themselves. You don't need to share more than you're comfortable with. I rarely talk about my personal life in my content, and everyone is in control of how open and private they want to be. However, you might completely change the trajectory of your business with one post about your experience as a stay-at-home parent. That might be the post that gets a ton of views because millions of other parents can relate. Through that increased distribution, you could build awareness for your business, assuming your profile hygiene is on point, and build trust as a result of sharing your personal side. Your video about your passion for sneaker collecting might lead to more business for your B2B hardware company because your customers' kids who are in college or high school shared your video with them. If you built a following through posting your modeling photos on Instagram, but you love food, consider posting about your favorite recipes one out of every five posts.

One thing I'd ask for all of you that are listening: do you act differently around your friends than you do professionally? Do you act differently around your family than you act professionally? Consider bringing those versions of you to your business and to your content in general. This is something people have been told for a long time not to do, but I'm telling you, you should. I believe that history will prove me right, that the concept will be right. People are always worried about losing respect with their audience by posting something that no one cares about. The reality is, putting out content is never a bad thing. The more topics you touch on, the more opportunities people have to relate to you.

Next, do you occasionally mix in content to get answers to questions you have? The best way to figure out what content to make is to literally ask the audience. You could use the poll feature, which multiple platforms have, to ask questions and gather data, or use other creative units. For example, say you have a YouTube channel about fitness, but you really want to post about fashion and you're not sure how people will react. You can start by doing a poll through YouTube community tab where you ask people, "I'm really passionate about fashion and I have a lot of interesting tips to share. Would you all be interested in seeing one or two videos?" You could take it a step further. Have you ever thought about dressing better? What's stopping you? These are questions you can ask in the poll feature. You could even state a strong point of view that you have in a video related to your business to see if people have a different take from you in the comments. For example, if you have a bike shop and you're wondering what bikes people are most interested in, you could make a video pointing to one and saying, "This bike is the best for mountain biking." You might get some comments from people who disagree and have other recommendations, which will give you a sense of what's running through other people's minds. Those insights would inform the ideation of future content.

Are you finding the right balance between asking for business while providing value? This is a concept I talked about in Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, and is still an important topic to consider to this day. Back then, I noticed that people usually fell into two categories. They would either not put out enough jabs — free value — to balance their right hooks — asking for business — or they would only put out free value and were too scared to ask for business. There's no set formula here, and every business and brand needs to find its own balance. But make sure you're doing both. As you're putting out free, valuable, organic content across platforms, make sure you're taking the overperformers and make sure you're turning them into sales-focused ads. Every now and then, when you have something specific to promote, you could even post a sales-focused piece of content organically across platforms directly asking for people to buy or sign up. If you're only asking for people to buy, however, they'll quickly tune you out. So, make sure to balance the asks with a high volume of valuable content.

Spending against what works, aka not wasting a penny. The first television commercial aired in 1941 before a game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. I hope the Phillies won, by the way. I'm a big Philadelphia fan, though. I love you too, Brooklyn. Actually, I hope this is a draw. I know that there's no draws in baseball. Let me keep going. The company that ran it, Bulova Watches, paid somewhere between $4 and $9 to air the commercial. According to the inflation calculator from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, $9 in 1941 is just over $180 in 2023. That's incredibly cheap for a TV commercial. It featured a picture of the United States map with a clock in the middle displaying the company's name. A narrator in the background read out the words, "America runs on Bulova time." And that was it. It was before people knew how to leverage the visual components of TV and how to make commercials that were different from radio ads that ruled the day prior to television. Yet, despite the lack of SOCK and PAC understanding on what makes a great television commercial, it was still a good deal at the time.

Similarly, over the last decade, brands and businesses were able to cover up mediocre content through the extreme underpriced nature of social media advertising. Marketers would be able to set up a Facebook conversion campaign, write some copy, select a stock photo from their built-in library, and actually get results. The supply of quality ads was so low that businesses could get away with generic creative. It's like when you're the only restaurant in town, people are still going to eat food even if it isn't excellent. When there are 15 restaurants in town, you need to serve better food. As more advertisers have come in and the advertising platform algorithms have evolved, creative has become the most important variable in a successful media campaign. With Meta — to remind everybody, Meta's Facebook and Instagram — with Meta's Advantage+ shopping campaigns, you can feed up to 150 combinations of creative at the time of this recording, and the platform will automatically serve creative to the best possible audiences to hit your objective. The targeting with Advantage+ shopping campaigns would be broad, limited only by age and geographic area, and the algorithm would do the rest. The paid advertising ecosystem across platforms is moving in the same direction as their organic content algorithms. They're becoming more and more interest-led.

Depending on their sophistication, they will take your creative and distribute it to whoever is most likely to take the action you want them to take — whether it's visiting your website, buying your product, signing up with email, or any other action-based ad objective the platform offers. At the time of this recording, Facebook, Google Ads (which includes YouTube), Instagram, and TikTok are currently leading the way in terms of the sophistication of their advertising algorithm. For example, Google's Performance Max campaign type: the algorithm is built to optimize performance in real time and find who's most likely to convert across all of Google's channels — YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.

What does this mean for you? For instance, if you're looking to get donations for a nonprofit, you could run an ad campaign on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube and layer on age, country, and interest-based targeting related to your category. On Facebook and Instagram, that means you can target people interested in health and wellness. If you're a nonprofit related to feeding people, you can rely on the platform to find the best donors through their algorithms without manually targeting 30- to 35-year-old high-income men and women in New York City who are interested in health and wellness. You might just target everyone in the US who's interested in health and wellness and see who converts. However, there's still a place for setting narrower targeting based on the cohorts you're trying to reach.

Not all platform algorithms are equally advanced in terms of automatically distributing your creative to the perfect audience, and some mediums work differently than others. If you're running podcast ads on Spotify, you wouldn't want to broadly target every podcast that exists because they don't have an interest graph-driven conversion algorithm that can automatically find listeners most likely to convert. In that case, you'd want to choose targeting categories based on cohort strategy. Through platforms like Nextdoor, a hyper-local social network, you might benefit from layering a zip code-specific targeting with creative that's contextual to local areas.

Twitter allows advertisers to target based on keywords people search in their search queries. Even on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, layering on manual, narrow targeting can be beneficial sometimes, especially when you know for a fact that your creative resonates with a group of people through your organic content insights. Your ad objective also plays a role: if you're optimizing for reach — aka showing your ad to as many people as possible — rather than a specific action such as a website visit or a conversion, you might want to go narrower with your targeting or use your first-party data so that the platforms aren't showing your ads to completely random people.

If you're new to the world of paid advertising, experiment with everything. Try a campaign where you manually specify targeting details that are related to cohorts who resonated with your organic content, and try some with broader targeting. There are a lot of nuances here when it comes to what your ad targeting should be, what's a good cost per thousand impressions (known as CPMs), what your maximum ad frequency should be, and more. The best way to learn is by running campaigns yourself.

By putting out SOCK informed by pack insights, you can minimize the risk of wasting money on your ad campaigns and unnecessarily driving up your customer acquisition cost, known as CAC in the marketing world. This is especially important in the modern world. After Apple's iOS 14.5 update, which introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT), apps had to ask users for permission to track their activities across other apps and websites. Since users had to opt in rather than opt out, many chose not to opt in. This created challenges for advertisers as it limited the amount of data that advertising platforms had access to.

A lot of direct-to-consumer and e-commerce businesses were built off running Facebook ads to their website and then retargeting those visitors over and over again until they converted. In a post-iOS 14.5 world, it became much harder for platforms like Facebook to track who landed on your website. The available data became far more limited. Even on desktop devices, there are more and more limitations on the data shared between browsers and advertising platforms. This has a couple of implications.

Number one, it's one of the reasons why platforms like Instagram and TikTok focused on building out their own shops that allow users to browse products and buy within the app itself. If users buy within the app, they own that data and they can use it to serve more relevant ads to people rather than being at the mercy of other companies like Apple. TikTok, for example, currently has a shop retargeting feature that allows advertisers to show ads to people who have interacted with their TikTok shop.

Two, building brand through organic content is even more imperative than ever. Today, the best way to reach high-intent audiences is through well-made content. Even in your ad campaigns, your creative is the most important variable because the algorithm generally does the job of delivering the content to people most likely to watch or convert.

For example, let's say you're a plumber with $700 to spend on paid ads this month. You've been putting out content already across platforms for months. You're seeing some overperforming organically, and you're trying to decide where to allocate your budget. The first thing to do in this situation is find the normal range of views and engagement you get on your organic posts across platforms. If most of your posts get 5 to 25 views, but seven of the videos got 500 to 700, then that's clear overindexing in performance, even if it's not going viral by everyone else's standards.

Before running media, make sure to slightly tweak those seven videos visually to be more sales-focused. If your video is funny, maybe you can add a few frames at the end of the video saying, "If you want a plumber with 12 years of experience and also a sense of humor, click to get a free consultation." You could also add a version of that line to the copy of your video. Then you could take those seven videos and spend $100 against each of them within a 5-mile radius of your town.

Look at which two performed the best and got the most consultations, and next month spend more money on that ad or those two ads. You could also repurpose it for other platforms. If you ran the ad on Facebook initially, try adding a native title on the video using TikTok content creation tools and try capturing it on the app. Then post it on TikTok and amplify it there to see if it does well organically.

The biggest mistake a lot of small businesses and service providers make in this situation is spending too much of their budget too quickly. With the approach that I just touched on, you are giving yourself a chance to get more proof of the ad working before you invest more money on it. If you have the resources, you can expand your winning ads into more broadly relatable videos that people want to watch — modern commercials — and run those as YouTube pre-roll ads.

YouTube is also exciting because it's a gateway into CTV ads. Remember, that's connected TV. In fact, I had a fun moment with my dad at Cannes Lions in 2023. Let me go off script here because I know most of you don't know Cannes Lions. Cannes Lions is the big marketing conference in the south of France, and Cannes is very bougie, and everybody's like ridiculously obnoxious, and everybody thinks they're so important in the marketing world and think they're famous. Yet none of you that are listening to this right now have ever heard of a creative director from Ogilvy in your life. Anyway, that's what Cannes Lions is. All right, let me go back to it.

I had a fun moment with my dad at Cannes Lions 2023 when he was talking about a commercial that came up when he was watching television and how he couldn't hit the skip the ad button fast enough. The fascinating insight in this story here is that although my dad called it television and a television commercial, it was actually an ad on YouTube that he was watching through his connected TV.

The reason I bring up this story — I'm going to go off script again — is I was doing, you know, a big talk with a bunch of CMOs on our bougie yacht for VaynerX, and my dad was in the audience, which was a lot of fun. My mom and dad now come with me to Cannes, which is nice. And my dad obviously, you know, I get his DNA. He couldn't sit still and needed to say something, and he like raised his hand in the middle of this like important like keynote with all these people on the fireside chat, and he's like, "Yeah, and, and, and you got to remember..." My dad, like hopefully you follow him on Instagram, that's Sasha Vaynerchuk, S-A-S-H-A V-A-Y-N-E-R. He's got like an Ivan Drago-like Russian accent, and he's like, "Yes, I'm very upset that the commercial went, I can't skip it on the television." I'm like, "Dad, that was YouTube," and he didn't even realize it. He had this epiphany while he was saying it, like he treats YouTube now.

And my dad's 70, and this is a big call out to everyone. This whole book, while I'm on this rant, let me just go there. It's not for the kids anymore. Social media marketing is not for the kids anymore. Modern marketing is not for the kids anymore. My father represents what I know a lot of you know if you're in his demo or if you have parents or grandparents in that demo. A stunning amount of 60, 70, 80, 90-year-olds are now watching YouTube predominantly, not cable or network television, and they know how to use it, and they know how to use it through the remote. And they're being served YouTube ads instead of the commercials that show up on network TV.

These are less expensive ads. They can be more targeted. They can be very smart. They can be micro-targeted to cohorts. My dad watches a lot of like Russian stuff. He watches a lot of koi. He's into like koi fish. He watches like how to make homemade beef jerky, and I see the ads that pop up and they're very targeted, and he's curious by it. Nothing like that is happening for him when he's watching television.

And so anyway, big moment at Cannes that had everyone really understand this isn't for the 15-year-olds anymore. These are 70- and 80-year-olds who can be massively affected and buy things because of the stuff we're talking about in this book. I know that was my longest rant. It's because I love my dad a lot. All right.

Three in four TV-owning households had smart TVs, which are TVs that could be accessing the internet and streaming services integrated into the TV itself, like a Roku or an Amazon Fire Stick, as of Q1 2023 — so about a year and change ago. That number is only up, by the way. Through connected TV devices, people can watch YouTube, other over-the-top or OTT streaming services like Hulu and Netflix, and FAST channels like Tubi and Pluto — free ad-supported streaming TV channels.

Or like, as you may know, I'm going a little off script here. A lot of Samsung TVs now, you just plug it in and they're just channels. Those are FAST channels. That's like TV. Now, streaming services like Hulu and devices like Roku have increasingly accessible advertising options for small businesses. I'm going off script again. We're clearly an important part. Small businesses — you have a hair salon, you've got a couple hundred a month to run ads — you can now run commercials. Think about that. That's insane.

Even if you're a solopreneur, you can literally run ads on shows that play when people are watching something on Hulu. At the time of this recording, if you get approved as a small-medium business on Hulu, you can run ads for as little as $500 a month. Television ads. Dustin, television ads. Say something. They can hear you. Like, "Wow" or something.