“The largest trend in the West is the rise of live social shopping,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia, during a live broadcast on stage at the Brand Innovators Marketing Innovation Summit during SXSW London stage.
“No bullshit, this can change your entire career,” he added. “I’m not kidding.”
Vaynerchuk encouraged the sixty or so people in the room to spend 10 hours “chatting, convening, and Googling live social shopping and TikTok Shop.” A good starter: “What’s been going on in China and live shopping, what does it mean for Europe and the U.S.?,” he said. “Start getting educated. It’s enormous.”
Vaynerchuk, who was dialing in from his home studio, shared that in his downtime, he is building a side project: a Pokemon Marvel World called VeeFriends. “Last night, I was on livestreaming on a platform called Whatnot, I was on for two hours, and we did $140,000 in revenue,” he shared.
“Now, to give you context, if I did a perfect social media execution of content and spent $10K media dollars and drove everybody to our perfectly optimized Shopify pages with the same product that I sold last night, I would probably have done $7,000,” he explained. “Live social shopping is a profound consumer behavior.”
Vaynerchuk said that social selling should be a form of entertainment. “You’re not just selling when you’re up, but you’re building community, and you’re giving entertainment, and you’re mixing commerce,” he said.
Beyond social commerce, Gary Vaynerchuk said that AI influencers are the future.
“I believe that all of you will be in the intellectual property business in a decade,” he said. “All of you will create your own influencers who look like humans and I think that the marketing world that has been so good to the day to day human and they have taken a lot of money away from celebrities and athletes, AI influencers are about to take their money.”
Vaynerchuk noted that most consumers have already likely consumed a photo of video of an AI person without realizing it. “Once that is at full scale, which I think is happening this year, a lot of brands are going to realize, wait a minute, instead of renting a post for an influencer, let us see if we can make an attempt at making our own,” he said.
