The Mid-Funnel is the Biggest Opportunity in Marketing
The GaryVee Audio Experience
Gary Vaynerchuk
4.8 • 18.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of the GaryVee Audio Experience, I sit down with Jon Evans to discuss the enduring truth of marketing, the massive mid-funnel opportunity, and the challenges facing corporate marketers today. I share my foundational belief that relevance leads to purchase and explain how I used this principle to grow my father's business, Wine Library. I'm "flabbergasted" by the amount of money still wasted on unvalidated creative and make the case for why marketers are losing credibility with "fake data."
You'll learn:
- The unchanging business truth that relevance leads to consideration and purchase.
- Why I believe the mid-funnel—organic social media creative—is the biggest opportunity in marketing.
- My strategy for validating creative for free on social media platforms before spending media dollars.
- Why I am seeing CFOs show more belief in modern marketing strategies than CMOs.
- Why Live Social Shopping and YouTube Shorts are the most important trends for any product-selling business today.
- The number one trait of a successful marketer is the "lack of fear of losing their job"
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There is no logic. |
| 0:01.2 | If you understood what's happening in meta and bite dance |
| 0:04.5 | and snap and YouTube and Google, |
| 0:06.4 | if you understood how these algorithms are written |
| 0:08.9 | purely for relevance, the thing that we've been chasing |
| 0:11.6 | to measure our whole lives. |
| 0:13.0 | For 100 years, marketers like us, |
| 0:15.0 | the bane of our existence has been trying to understand |
| 0:18.1 | the creative before it goes into market. |
| 0:20.2 | Focus groups, fake reports, |
| 0:22.4 | politics among seven important people in a room. We've been struggling with this deep knowledge |
| 0:27.8 | that we know, which is if the creative isn't right, we lost. I ask for a lot of you is take your |
| 0:33.8 | hat off of being a corporate animal and understanding how your organization measures everything |
| 0:38.5 | and put your human hat on and listen to it and understand it. There is literally no reason to waste |
| 0:44.4 | marketing dollars anymore. We don't have the guess. Do we really still have the audacity to think |
| 0:49.3 | our subjective opinion on a 30 second video or a picture is going to drive the business. Every single brand in here's |
| 0:55.7 | biggest issue is not awareness, it's relevance. And if you're small and you need awareness, you can only |
| 1:01.4 | get it through scaled relevance. This is the Gary Vee audio experience. This is an amazing |
| 1:08.5 | opportunity to have you in the room. Gary, thank you so much, mate, for doing this. |
| 1:11.6 | Thank you so much, everyone, for being here, really. |
| 1:13.6 | So I've got a few questions I want to put to Gary. |
| 1:15.6 | I had the honor of meeting him actually at the Wine Library, which was really special, man. It was kind of cool to see there because like I noticed when we finished filming, you were straight downstairs doing a wine review and you were |
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