There are notable scam artists of every generation, and we can always identify a scam artist by their greedy thirst for money and ruthless manipulation. Men like Charles Ponzi, the namesake for the Ponzi scheme, or Bernie Madoff, who took the Ponzi scheme structure to new heights and scammed people out of over 50 Billion dollars collectively.
However, we are in 2024, and we don’t need to trick people out of their money. Attention is the new currency of the internet, which brings me to the question.
If someone wastes your time and gives you bad advice, are they a scammer? Wholeheartedly, no. The fact of the matter is we can’t believe everything someone tells us, we can’t believe everything we read, we can’t believe everything we see on TV, and we definitely can’t believe everything we read on the internet. Including me, feel free to challenge my thoughts and perspective. It’s normal and healthy.
Back to the original question…
Is Gary Vee a scammer? No, but he’s an opportunist, and you should be careful about his advice.
He’s living, walking, breathing proof if your parents are successful entrepreneurs with a seven-figure business that they let you run with a marketing budget provided. You, too, can be a successful entrepreneur. Not to be fair, he has reached astronomical heights, but the foundation of his success is the business his father built. It’s harder to build a business from $10 to $1 million dollars than to make a $1 million business into a 10 million dollar business because now you have resources and capital.
For me, this puts an asterisk on the foundation of his success but not on marketing knowledge. One of the fastest and most effective ways to learn marketing is to have room for trial and error. Learning and testing your marketing knowledge by selling t-shirts one at a time is challenging. An established business with products, services, a client base, and a reputation allowed him to spread his wings with ideas and get relatively quick customer feedback. Whereas, if you don’t have a marketing budget, you have to save money to run advertisements or use credit cards and pray you have a fruitful idea just to break even.
I know because this is how I started marketing my catering business with credit cards and a couple hundred dollars I had left at the end of the month. It put me in crippling debt, but I learned how to run social media ads, how to do influencer marketing, hiring a social media team, print advertising, SEO, Google ads, website building, and a lot more.
So, please don’t take my criticism as “hating”; I simply recognize the advantages he doesn’t speak about. To be fair, he doesn’t have to; most people don’t care how the sausage is made.
At one point, I watched his videos regularly. For a novice or anyone lost when it comes to social marketing, there are going to be a few helpful tools and tricks. Good housekeeping and marketing commandments like Posting Regularly, shooting behind-the-scenes content, interacting with followers, and messaging potential customers are also included.
They’re essential and valuable. It’s kind of like a doctor telling you to exercise and avoid fried foods. If I follow the advice, it’ll work, but it wasn’t “The secret to weight loss.”
This is where Gary Vee and many other popular marketing channels are very misleading. They promise big results, industry secrets, or the keys to success.
Newsflash, these videos are the “Flat Tummy Tea” of marketing. Hard work and consistency are the primary ingredients.
Hard work doesn’t get clicks. That is why I can’t necessarily implicate him as a scammer. It would be incorrect. People (myself included at one point) are looking for the answers that do not exist. Ultimately avoiding homework and trying to get the answers to the test from YouTube.
The problem is that many people want real marketing advice, and you may be misled. In my experience, once my local catering business earned six or seven figures, it became clear how shallow the advice was.
In a time when earning money is the top priority of both men and women, entrepreneurship has been booming for the last ten years and skyrocketed to new heights during COVID-19. Over the decades, corporations have valued loyalty to their employees less and less. If a Gen X and U employee didn’t make it to the executive level by now, they’ve either been laid off, forced to retire, or holding on to their job for dear life, swatting away millennials from their positions.
More people have wisely opted to become business owners. The problem is they don’t know how to run a business or sell their products and services.
Insert the master salesman, Gary Vee.
At a bare minimum, the man is a phenomenal salesman, which is an admirable quality but difficult to duplicate.
As a whole, the situation is icky. Large YouTube creators put themselves in a pickle. Gary Vee has close to 5k videos on YouTube alone. It’s impossible for each of those to even have 1 organic helpful piece of advice. There’s a lot of fluff, duplicate information, and difficult-to-apply information.
My recommendation is to study their channel, not the videos. Study the artwork, video length, frequency, headlines, and subject matter. Do your own homework, and success will follow
