# Social-First Strategy and AI Ad Stigma

**Podcast:** Masters of Scale
**Published:** 2026-02-07

## Transcript

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It's Super Bowl week.
We are here in San Francisco.
And if you don't know, now you know this is where everyone gathers.
It is not just athletes and people who are in the world of sport.
It is leaders from across every category business showing up here and really not just to enjoy the game.
In fact, the pro move for a lot of them is to fly out on Sunday morning and go watch the game at home.
Sh don't tell.
One of the conversations we got to have is with an old friend of mine named Gary Vaynerchuck, probably better known to you as Gary V.
Gary is one of the best marketers, one of the most creative people in business you could ever hope to spend time with.
He gave us 10 minutes and 10 minutes with Gary is worth two hours with almost anyone else.
You're gonna love this one.
A Super Bowl ad about shitting.
Yeah, you know, like shitting is something everyone understands.
We all do it.
Everyone does it.
Uh hopefully at least once a day.
I think it's super clever.
Like, it's amazing to me how many people think about pooping in fiber.
Like, now that there's so much buzz around our Super Bowl spot with Raisin Brand, I was like, wow, like we had the insight, right?
But I was like, oh well, like everyone knows.
And so, and the will shat, like that, I gotta give my creative team like this is why you hire talented people and give them room to cook.
Yeah.
Um, it's so clever, and we're really proud of it.
And what I'm most proud of is, as you know, because we've known each other a long time, we were focused on we believe believe that social would not only eventually rival traditional, but would surpass it.
The the the social surround sound.
Yeah, like we've already kind of won.
It hasn't aired yet.
Right.
But what happens if Shatner says no?
Is there a plan B on this one?
Is there someone with another name that works, or is it like No, that one was it's it's a one-of-one idea.
Yeah, we we have many ideas when we approach Super Bowl.
We've done about 15 spots in the last 10 years, eight years.
We have to you have you have to come by the way, Will's not young.
Like, you know, it's fun.
I mean, by the way, let me tell you something very devastating.
We had a Super Bowl commercial with J Lo for Hard Rock Hotel that had a helicopter in it the year that Kobe passed.
Oh.
And we had to redo the commercial.
Wow.
Like, yeah.
So when you're in Super Bowl commercial land, you're in anything can happen.
Yeah.
I mean, like, literally, one of the things, you know, as an owner, I'm always thinking about what could go wrong.
When when we're like, we're doing William Shatner, I'm like, he's 94.
I'm like, like, I don't want to say it.
Right.
But like there's risk.
So, so, but yes, if Will was like, hey, too expensive, we're not interested, we would have went with a different direction.
But the whole concept was this is what you use the superhole for.
We need to think, and all of you are it's amazing.
No matter what your age is, we're all thinking about fiber more.
It's trending, just like Protein did.
Like, we need Raisin Brand to be associated with fiber as like an easy way to do it.
This was the way to do it.
So once you get that, and are you going in with the social and being like, we're gonna we're gonna do every version of this?
Like this ad is the shit.
Like instead of I ship this ad, I shit this ad, like uh is it coins in the slot machine, like here are all the ideas we're gonna do to capitalize on this.
But it's funny the analogy is I keep trying to push this on Madison Avenue.
It is not coins in the slot machine.
I actually let's use football.
Great.
It is we're gonna throw the ball 41 times this Sunday against the Patriots, and here's what we are like strategically on film, right?
It's we're running 41 social media ads with purpose.
Yeah, not like, oh, let's see what the algorithm does.
Right.
So yes and no.
Well, but with purpose, you still don't know what's gonna catch you.
You can have a theory about you can you can feel really good about something that you don't know.
Correct.
But in social, you can afford to do 41 passes at a low cost and get quantum qual data.
Television, I have to spend a fortune and pray.
Right, right.
And there's there's no take the data, pivot the next day, or just like that.
When in television, you're going broad, so now all of a sudden you're doing vanilla, something that's not relevant.
You're trying to be everybody, you're trying to be everything to everyone, which means you're nothing to no one.
Right, right.
You know, and so yeah, in social we're allowed to take that message, and now let's go after Star Trek fans this way, and let's go after people 60 to 90 this way, and let's figure out some way to let 25 year olds know who the hell this is.
And like it gets it gets very strategic.
And so when when you and I first started hanging out 20-ish years ago, um, it was like pushing a boulder up a hill to get CMOs to even think like they didn't have social media budgets.
They had no like they didn't have digital budgets.
It was like a whole different world.
How is it today going and sitting with the CMO and a marketing team and pitching ideas that like that like you know, you got a CEO who's probably like the CMO at some point and go, we're linking our brand literally to shit.
Are you sure?
Right?
That one was easy again, to your point.
For 99% of our clients, they would not do that.
When you were in the fiber business, and it is gut health and it is poop, that was it made sense.
I think overall, you know, it's funny you asked me this question, and this is so common in stories when you're on the right side of history.
The amount of shit, pun intended, that I had to eat to what's happened in the last six months, brother, I can't believe.
I mean, flying to San Francisco, I was with my North American president.
We we were supposed to get six hours worth of work done.
We probably had five hours of pinching ourselves of like, we have clients that two years ago would would balk at 500,000 for the year in organic social that are looking to sign 25 million dollar deals.
This is real.
So what's changed?
What's changed in those six months?
The truth suffocated everyone.
When you're Pepsi, and I'm in the building for 13 years like I am, and I'm like, and nothing's changing in their day-to-day business that much because Coke's not doing anything easier either.
Nothing happens.
But when Poppy, Liquid Death, and Prime Energy Drink go attack Gatorade, Pepsi, and Aquafina, and you get hurt.
Yeah.
The answer to your question is, why did it switch for us?
Pain.
Our clients started to feel pain.
And when you start to feel pain, all of us, why are we doing bad food and exercise behavior?
But guess what?
Go to the doctor and be told you're in deep trouble.
I have a funny feeling we're gonna all shape up.
Yeah.
Brands are starting to feel the pain of doing a non-social first strategy.
And uh it is uh we are the great beneficiaries because we have been the pie piper for 20 years that this is the real game.
I was in a meeting yesterday, where someone said, and I'm waiting for the data to back this up, that they're starting to see their AI generated ads outperform their human-produced ads.
By the way, it could save you time.
That is true.
Okay, what do you seeing?
I I see that both can work.
Meaning a their AI ads that perform will be cheaper than the human-based.
Well, and and and on you can create the they're not even ads, they're pieces of content.
You can create hundreds of people.
Here's how it's gonna play out.
For the next three to five years, the big companies aren't gonna do it because we keep yelling at them because we're all scared we're gonna lose our jobs, so we're just mad at AI.
So the big companies are not gonna be able to do AI.
By the way, there should be AI Super Bowl ads this Super Bowl.
Why aren't they?
Because they'll get murdered.
Why?
Everybody, because humans in society are scared about AI, so they shame brands and say, I'm not gonna buy your stuff, and brands don't want to lose marketship.
But it's called stigma.
Do you remember online dating in 2001 and two?
We're in the perfect age, some of us here.
If we had friends or ourselves, met someone on match.com, we made up that we met them at the bar.
We were in cahoots with our new boyfriend or girlfriend, because there was that much stigma around online dating in 2001, two, three, four.
Yeah.
Now, even I mean, when I was at MySpace, we did married on MySpace.
We did a whole show about people who met on MySpace and got married.
Right.
Okay.
Um next year's the first year we see an AI generated ad in the Super Bowl.
No, I think I think there's an I think 28 maybe, or a startup.
And by the way, we might have it this year from the AI companies.
I don't know if open AI or Did you see the Anthropic ads yet?
I saw Twitter this morning going crazy about it, but I don't I don't have the context.
Okay, okay.
Was it AI generated?
No, just made fun of open AI.
It's a it's it is an absolute mocking of open AI integrating ads, and and Sam wrote a lengthy reply that was defensive.
But yes, but pay attention.
The fact that the AI companies did not make AI ads in a world where we all know that you could make a great AI video right now.
I mean, McDonald's got murdered a couple months ago.
If you follow Ad Land, they made an ad.
Burger King like mocked it and like stole the per like it went poorly.
And so I think that made everyone say, oh, we're definitely not doing that for a year or two.
But it will happen.
The stigma will go away, and uh my company will have to adjust, and every company will have to adjust.
What's the number one thing CMOs aren't thinking about today that they need to be thinking about to be successful three, six, nine months from now?
I would say they're probably have thought about it, but they're not serious enough about it.
There's two social creative and how it affects the GEO and AEO results in the LLM.
And two, live social shopping.
The QVC efication of social media.
The half a trillion dollar industry in China is now here.
Is that TikTok and YouTube?
Or is that TikTok shop number one?
That is whatnot, the independent app number two, that is eBay live quickly number three.
That is Twitch live shopping starting to groom.
And inevitably you gotta think that Google, YouTube, and Meta, Facebook, Instagram are gonna get serious about this because the economics are astonishing.
There's also, for all the nerds out there, there's an app called District.
Uh, full disclosure, I'm thinking about investing in it.
It's the Shopify of live shopping, very smart play.
Yeah.
So there's a lot going on in that space.
Amazon owns Switch.
Do they integrate Twitch live shopping into Amazon?
Is that what we see?
I I Because their plays have been not very good in this place.
We gotta find one for you.
You know, yeah, I'm sitting with one.
I think that's one of the places.
Yeah.
You know, you know, they're a little decentralized there.
Um I I do not see a world where I actually think the only reason that Google, aka, YouTube, and Meta are not in it right now is because they're so distracted by AI.
Yeah.
And they're right, that's a bigger thing to focus on.
But had the AI thing happened two years from now, not last year or two years ago, I think you would have already seen executions from them.
Economics are enormous.
Our mutual friend Cole Lazro is graduating from college in just a few months.
The best kid, he calls you and he says, Gary, I need I need one piece of advice to share with my classmates who are going out in this uncertain world where AI is eating the entry-level jobs.
What are you telling Cole to tell us about it?
Go work for as little as possible, whether you're lucky like Cole, where maybe you have parents that can help you, or you're unlucky like I was, where you were just willing to live humbly with five roommates and live that life.
Go work for as little as possible.
You gotta live to be as close to the sun as possible.
Want to be in sports?
Go be an intern for Pat McAfee, the number seven intern, and just be around it.
Want to be in marketing?
Come to Vayner and do our residency program.
Just get close to the thing.
That is a huge mistake.
The amount of people that have big dreams in their 20s that don't realize they get offered 5,000 more from some job that has nothing to do with their life dream, but they're not humble enough or willing to eat enough crow to go work somewhere where they're right there in the traffic.
Want to be in music?
Go work for the most important music manager or label or Spotify for nothing.
Just get close to the action.
Love you, man.
Love you too.
Great to see you.
Good job, man.
Did a good job.
Great to see you.
Always, man.
Have a fun week.
Great.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
We'll catch up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, appreciate you, buddy.
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