Carlos Gil’s latest book is called The End of Marketing. In it, and in this podcast episode, he claims Influencer Marketing is Bullshit. This is ironic coming from someone who not only advises companies and brands in the marketing space — where influencers are a hot channel for discussion — but has built a bit of a career as an influencer in his own right.

Carlos and I have sparred on a topic or two over the years. He’s an instigator and a disruptor and often brings a bit of a contrarian perspective on the status quo in the marketing conversation. But that’s what I respect about him most. I took the bait and had him on the show to spar a bit on the topic. What developed was a deep, interesting conversation about influence, the credibility of company executives, fake influencers, Snapchat’s failures and beyond. 

Gil offers ideas in this discussion that are valuable for brand managers and influencers alike. He also opens up a bit about the impostor syndrome and how and why some people might be critical of his career and success, which frankly was refreshing to hear.

Give this one one a good listen, then share it with someone who might appreciate it as much as I did.

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Winfluence Podcast – Carlos Gil Transcript

Announcer
C-Suite Radio,

Jason Falls
Want Instagrammers and YouTubers to mention your brand? Or do you want to influence an audience to buy your product? I’m Jason Falls, author of the book Winfluence – Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand. In this podcast we explore the people, companies, campaigns and stories that illustrate the difference between using influencers and actually influencing. Welcome to Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast.

Jason Falls
Hello again friends thanks for listening to Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast. Carlos Gil’s latest book is called The End of Marketing. In it and in this podcast episode, he claims influencer marketing is bullshit. As one might expect, and I wanted to hold him to the fire on that after hearing him out of course. So I invited him to join us today on the program. Carlos and I have sparred on a topic or two over the years. He’s an instigator and a disrupter. And often brings a bit of contrarian perspective on the status quo in the marketing conversation, but that’s what I respect about him most. I like to think I try to play that role sometimes. Without people like Carlos, we have fewer conversations about the trends and topics we need to understand more deeply. We don’t question what big companies or software sales people or even some talking head thought leaders tell us, and therefore, we don’t shape our own path. We follow others off the cliff. This episode, probably more than others so far is really to people who know the industry fairly well. Having a really deep interesting discussion, if not debate about influencer marketing company executives and their credibility, fake influencers and the like. And for all of you influencers and content creators out there, stay through to the end, Carlos gives some really good advice for you to learn from his experiences. We also talk about how Snapchat has evolved and a bit more. Carlos Gil is a smart one. He’s an influencer within marketing, but also within some niches among consumers. I don’t always agree with him. But again, he makes me stop and think sometimes and not always to just yell get off my lawn. He also opens up a bit about the imposter syndrome and how and why some people might be critical of his career and success, which frankly, was refreshing to hear. So take a few minutes and check out our discussion. It’s a healthy interesting back and forth, and it’s coming up next on Winfluence.

Jason Falls
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Jason Falls
Carlos, let’s start out by talking about your book … Marketing is dead. I think your point in this book was to say that brands have migrated away from being genuine and engaged and maybe have slipped back into just throwing money at the problem buying ads not engaging with consumers and so on. Is that a fair assessment of the book and and whether it is or it isn’t? You tell me what you were trying to say with that.

Carlos Gil
So that’s a good point, Jason. And I want to start off by saying that marketing will always continue to live. So spoiler alert for those that haven’t read them the marketing. The very last page of the book I share with readers. Basically I start the book by telling people marketing is dead. It’s the very first sentence but then I end the book with re emphasizing that marketing will always live on. However marketing is always evolving. And that one line, okay, marketing is dead. It resonates differently. What I’ve seen based on the type of marketer or Let’s just say the demographic. And let me give you an example. So in full transparency, I’m 37 years old, I kind of fall in this this weird space, if you will, because I’ve been doing social media a fairly long time since 2008. But I’m an older millennial. And you have younger millennials, you have Gen Z, now they’re working in the business. And based on who you ask, they will say that marketing is dead is a reference to social media marketing is dead. based on who you ask, they’ll say the advertising and consumer marketing as we know it is dead. So I was very careful. When I put in parentheses that the as we know it piece, because again, marketing is continuing to evolve. And the whole premise of the end of marketing is that today, you need to really focus on putting a human face and a voice behind your brand, or actually, I should say, in front of your brand, because historically, brands have been built based on reputation, consumer sentiment, logo, actual products and services. As we know, these have all been the selling features behind why we buy from a brand. But as we’ve seen, especially where we’re at today, in 2020, almost 2021 people buy from people and they trust other people. So who’s really in control? Is it the multi billion dollar conglomerate? Or is it the people that are there promoting and endorsing these products, whether it’s influencers, customers, employees advocates?

Jason Falls
So if if the argument is that your brands maybe have have dialed out and are going through the motions, maybe just throwing money at the problem for those brands, I guess you would think then that influencers open a door to maybe reconnect with audiences if they’ve lost them, right.

Carlos Gil
Yes, and no. And to be blunt with you and those listening, I have a love hate relationship with influencer marketing. And Jason, I’d love to hear your thoughts. from your standpoint, also, you will have thought leader in the space I openly write in the book that I think that influencer marketing is bullshit. Okay. And you know, I say this, at the same time, brands actually pay me personally, to be an influencer. And the reason why I say that influencer marketing is bs is because I know from working on both the influencer side and the brand marketing side, that if you’re paying someone endorse your brand wants and then that person disappears. Yeah, you might get a little spike of traffic, you might get a couple extra sales, but it’s nothing that you’re really gonna want to hang your hat on, because that person goes away. And then you just did a campaign. So how effective was it really, then you also have, you know, influencers out there, you know, your Tick Tock stars or YouTubers that you really don’t know how they curated their audience. And and that’s really where I, you know, draw caution to brand marketers through my book is if you are paying someone to endorse your brand, but yet you have no idea who their audience is, how they curated them, if they even purchased or built a following organically. There’s so many unknown variables. So is influencer marketing, again, as we know it really effective? Or is it just smoke and mirrors? You know, I’m more of an advocate of building relationships organically with people that are speaking about you people that are customers, are your brand, even employees? I think those are the real influencers. curious to hear your thoughts?

Carlos Gil
Well, first of all, I think if you’re if you’re looking at if you’re defining influence marketing, only by those sort of short term transactional, I don’t really know anything about the influencers. audience. If that’s your definition of influences or influence marketing, then I agree with you. But that’s not my definition of influencer marketing. And you actually walked right into the my response is, yeah, but what about influencer marketing where you build relationship with influencers over time, where you actually look at people who are actually influential versus people who have a lot of followers on a given network. And and to be honest with you, the one thing that you said that kind of made me kind of scratch my head a little bit was, I don’t know of any brand, investing a fair amount of money in influencer marketing, that doesn’t do a deep dive in understanding how those influencers, built their audiences or what their audience is made of. Because if you don’t understand the audience of the influencer, then you’re you’re basically throwing darts in the dark, you have no earthly idea what you’re trying to hit with what you’re doing. Now, that would have been true, I think, you know, three, four or five years ago, but I think as influence marketing has evolved, especially with the analytics tools and whatnot that are out there. Now, brands are investing significant dollars in influence marketing, the first and foremost thing they do is identify the influencers that have commonalities and audience. So I think that if you look at what you what you described, to me, if you look at influence marketing myopically as a transactional shirt, short term, throw money at a problem thing, then Yeah, I agree with you. The That’s not how I look at it. And I don’t think that’s how most brands look at it.

Carlos Gil
You see, you bring up an interesting point there. I think it’s a double edged sword. Because oftentimes when brands are hiring influencers, they have a real objective in mind. And that’s to drive awareness around an event, a product, launch a campaign, what have you. But I’m also of the belief of if you’re paying people that have reach to go do something, why not just hire people internally, that have the skill set, that you’re really looking forward to create content? And why don’t you also build your own influencers from within, which, again, is something that, you know, I started to think about, maybe a few years ago, when Snapchat was really hot, and I started making friendships with other Snapchat influencers. And I started realizing, okay, there’s a reason why brands are hiring these, these guys and girls, and it really isn’t so much about the reach. Because let’s be honest, a Walmart or a Coca Cola or a Nike, these are trillion dollar entities that have more money than god and they can pay to get the reach. But the reason why they really hire influencers is for the content. And that made me start thinking of influencer marketing in a whole different manner if you’re paying someone to produce content, because yes, they are an influencer, and you can hang your hat on the partnership opportunity, then that does make sense to a degree. But again, I’m also the belief that you’re if you’re paying someone for a one time transaction that doesn’t really make dollars and cents at all. Instead, just hire someone to be a spokesperson or an advocate for you, or hire employees that have the skill set that you’re looking for. So now you can actually make your content look good, and be hopefully more engaging with your audience.

Jason Falls
But isn’t there isn’t there sort of a magic mix there, where you can say, Hey, I love this content creator and I love the type of content they create. Or I’m looking for this type of content. And I’ve identified someone who can create it. And oh, by the way, they also bring with them an external network that is kind of the audience that I want to reach because to me, that’s kind of the you know, the the relevancy Bullseye for influence marketing, if you can find someone who creates the type of content that you value, and that you want to, you know, collaborate with them on. And that person also has a relevant audience that you’re trying to reach. Now you’ve got the best of both worlds.

Carlos Gil
Yeah, I agree. And I think that you’re spot on, you know, brands are looking for all of the above. But again, it goes back down to consistency. I just don’t feel that influencer marketing is effective if you’re if you’re looking at this as a one off and you know, again, I could be wrong I’m sure there’s been very successful relationships and partnerships. You know, throughout vendor marketing I bring up some of those. You know, Gary Vee has a has a massive cult like following, right? His collaboration with K-Swiss is really injecting new life into K-Swiss but Gary Vee has now dropped, I think six or seven pairs of sneakers with him with them. I think that if he would have just dropped one or two and then disappeared, and now you start seeing Gary Vee wearing Nike the next week, then the collaboration wouldn’t have been as successful. You know it. In my case, you know, I’ve worked with brands like right now I’m doing a campaign with Nationwide Insurance. You know, this has been a campaign it’s been going for a year now. So it’s not like one day I’m promoting Nationwide next day, you never hear we talked about them. It’s ongoing. But again, to your point. And also alluding to I was saying before, the reason why brands will work with someone like myself is because quite frankly, they like how I come across a camera. And I can teach the whole the who my network is who my following is honestly secondary, because I know exactly what they’re looking for is they’re looking for that spunk, that flavor, that personality, that your average social media marketer that works and cyber brand doesn’t bring to the table.

Jason Falls
Yeah, I think that’s fair. But again, I think I think that there’s also a much broader lens to put on it, because why well, Nationwide, you know, may be using you because of your on camera on air presence, your personality, all that flair in that flavor. They might be using, you know, someone else who has, you know that that flair and flavor and they also know that their their audience that they bring with them is a value. I do agree with you that it’s the longer term relationships over time that actually, you know, benefit brands better and makes influencer marketing work. In fact, you know, we’ve got some spirits brands that I work with that we’ve been using the same sort of group of cocktail influencers and, you know, bourbon industry influencers for several years now. And it’s gotten to the point to where we’ve nurtured those relationships along to where we don’t even really have to ask them to participate in certain things. They just participate because they have a long standing relationship with the brand. There’s even some things that we do and we asked them to help us with we don’t have to pay them. Because again, it’s a long term partnership.

Carlos Gil
Yeah, no and I agree. And you see the key word there is partnership, it’s looking at those influencers that you work with as as partners, not just talent. And you know, I’ll give you another example. Last year, I had the pleasure of working with hertz, rent a car. And like the first one or two gigs, if you will did with them, it didn’t really catch on, I think people just saw is like, oh, Carlos is at South by Southwest. And you know, he’s in an escalating is promoting hurts, like, how much that cost sort of deal. But like, once engagement, three, or four or five happened, and people organically started reaching out to me, and they’re like, Hey, I’m getting ready to go out of town this weekend, do you have a promo code with hertz, or, you know, the best is, you know, someone rents a car, and then they tweet about it. And they say, like, you know, thank you to Carlos for, you know, putting hertz on my radar, I love the experience like that is when they, from my standpoint, really started to seeing the benefit of the partnership, because it wasn’t just a one off, you know, and that’s, that’s again, you know, going back to the to the book that wrote them, the marketing, that’s a big premise of what I teach throughout the book is, you know, people nowadays are used to being marketed to by brands, you know, we’re in 2029 2010. And there used to tuning out brands, that’s a reality, it’s, it’s hard for brands to stand out on social media today, especially with as much noise that’s being created. And people are trusting more those in their inner circles. And they’re trusting other people that have a human face or voice. So if you’re relatable to any degree, to someone, they’re going to be more prone to follow you and see what you’re posting, then, you know, a Nike again, or Starbucks, or Coca Cola, or any of those big brands. So what I really want for marketers that pick up my book to walk away from is, Alright, we got to this point in time, but doing what we’ve been doing historically is not going to get us through the next decade, what is going to get us through the next decade. And when you look at where we’re at now, with COVID, you look at where we’re at with, you know, the social justice movement in this country, even politics, right? There’s just so much noise that’s being created, I feel that brands, like ASAP, like yesterday, need to really start putting a human face and voice basically behind every piece of content that they post. And I know that that probably sounds crazy to some, but give me an example. And again, you know, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this, Jason, when the riots happened a few months ago, and there was Nordstrom stores and Target stores that were looted. When you looked at the Twitter account, or both of these brands, would you see you saw an image of a statement from each one of their CEOs, okay, you didn’t see their face, you just saw just a very dry, stale statement. And it felt lifeless, and if honestly felt like complete bullshit. Because you and I, being in the business know that the CEO of target didn’t send in an email to his social media team, writing what his thoughts were on the matter, neither the CEO at Nordstrom, you and I know that most likely their corporate comms and their PR team huddled around in a room for hours and thought about the perfect tweet to write. But when you have the technology that we have, nowadays, everyone has, for the most part really good iPhones, live video, it’s not difficult for CEO to really get on camera and to say how they really, really feel. And I think now we need to get back to the basics of what makes us human. And that probably sounds like a cliche to some marketers out there. But you know, look, take it for me. So I’m going to get in who’s kind of in that middle, right between, you know, millennial, and you know, that in the next generation up, you know, people are tired of being marketed to, and if you’re going to survive this next decade, you need to do something different than what you’ve been doing historically.

Jason Falls
So I hear that and and the thing that comes to mind for me is yes, I agree that, you know, a CEO or some high level, internal person is the best voice. But in many publicly traded companies, corporate environments, etc. That person is not always the best trained voice in order to be, you know, to act and look and feel human, on camera and whatnot. So my argument back to you would be, that’s why you have influencers. That’s why you engage and cultivate relationships with a group of people who have already built that trust with audiences already have the credibility with the people you’re trying to reach, and you partner with them to maybe not officially speak on your behalf, but maybe you do partner with him to speak on your behalf. And so, that’s where I think influencer marketing can actually help uplift and humanize a brand because the brand aligns with the influencers, the influencers align with the brand, they build a relationship over time. And over time, the influencers audience comes to know, hey, this person is sort of an extension of this brand. They have a collaboration and I respect that And they’ve always been transparent about what they’re doing and why. And so I would argue to you that if the CEO is not the right person to put out there influencers can be a good go between until he or she is.

Carlos Gil
So here’s a train of thought, though, why don’t we consider C-suite executives to be influencers? And I say this, because when you really get to know, a C-level executive, especially publicly traded corporation, these people in the business world are highly influential, more influential than someone who has a million followers on Tick Tock or subscribers on YouTube. I know what you’re saying, right? The C-suite executives, typically it’s an older guy or a woman, and they don’t have the following that, you know, a traditional influencer would have, but again, I think we’re kind of disregarding the fact that these people are respected and admired by many they just don’t have the voice or the presence that a digital or social media influencer would have?

Jason Falls
Well, I would I would push back on that a little bit. I think that yes, they are influential, they certainly have standing within their industry and of all things related to their company. And obviously, the the number one person you’re going to go to with regard to that particular company, and sometimes that particular industry is going to be the CEO of that organization. But where I don’t think they have the credibility is that when you hear a CEO talk, and when you see as CEO in an interview, or even on the video, on their Facebook page, or wherever, you know, as a consumer 1,000%, that the only thing that they are going to do in that situation is promote and talk and sell their company, they’re not going to be human, they’re going to be a mouthpiece, because that’s what CEOs are trained to be the only CEOs I can think of, that are not like that are the younger generation CEOs, the Gary V’s of the world who understand that being more human more transparent about who they are, and that they bring a personality to table. Those are the getters. And I don’t think until you know, the 20 somethings of today are the 40 and 50 somethings of today, you know, 20 and 30 years from now, I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of corporate level CEOs that we can genuinely look at and say yes, I trust this person. And therefore, they are truly influential in my life. Because I think people look at CEOs and think, yeah, mouthpiece, I’m not gonna add their credibility just didn’t there for me.

Carlos Gil
Yeah, no, I actually wholeheartedly agree with you, I think you’re absolutely right, you know, not to take a dig at, you know, any CEOs out there. Because we know that they’re the ones that cut the checks, you know, but I think you’ve got a lot of CEOs sitting out there in corporate America that, quite frankly, are just skating by waiting for retirement. And they’re not adopters, or believers of social media, they weren’t adopters of it a decade ago, they don’t really want to be adopters of it. Now, I know this from working on the inside of corporate brands, as a … you know, head of social myself, that when I was in those roles, typically the CMO or CEO, they would just kind of brush off all things, social media to, you know, to the marketing team. You know, which is frustrating because I would, you know, in my younger, younger days, push back and let these these folks know, like, Hey, you want to maybe rethink this this out, because first of all, if your corporate gig doesn’t work out, and we know that C-suite executives, they they move around a lot. If your gig doesn’t work out, social media is really gonna help you at that point, from a networking standpoint, from a personal brand standpoint, but again, you know, if you’re kind of low man on the totem pole, in a middle, you know, middle market marketing role talking to a C-suite executive that’s making millions of dollars, they don’t give a shit about your perspective on personal branding. Um, you know, but there’s that aspect. And then the second aspect is, is like you said, you know, a lot of CEOs are just kind of looked at as a mouthpiece. And, you know, I don’t think that that’s, that’s where the current is headed. I think people want to see something different from the brands that they follow. And, you know, hopefully, by hearing this podcast or by reading into marketing, you know, maybe one or two CEOs out there will change their, their their tune in terms of how they approach it.

Jason Falls
I remember something you did, it might have been an article at Entrepreneur or something like that, when Instagram did away with making likes public. So a little over a year ago, I think. And that shifted the way a lot of businesses and brands looked at the effectiveness of influencers and it shifted the way a lot of influencers were able to really justify their prices because Instagram is such a big player in the in the influence market today. I think you had a position that essentially said that fake influencers were going to go away now. What did you mean by that? What’s a fake influencer to you?

Carlos Gil
Man? It’s such a good question. And first of all, Instagram likes is really weird. I have not gone away for me. I think most of us in the US still can see how many people like our content. We can see others likes, are you still able to see other people’s likes?

Jason Falls
I haven’t been able to see in some cases, not at all I can see, you know, some individuals but a lot of of more of the, I think if you have the corporate account or the business data account, I think that’s where it gets hidden.

Carlos Gil
Got it. So, you know, what I meant by fake influencers is for the longest time, the way that the internet or Instagram culture, I should say, has really developed is it’s all about, you know, show and tell, so to speak. That’s what I refer to it as, you know, you meet this this other big star celebrity, you got to take a photo you got to share it, you drive this nice car, you got to share it, you have this nice Airbnb for the weekend, you got to share it. It’s just you know, it’s the show me culture that’s been developed. And in people actually look at influences as that, you know, it’s the vanity metrics, it’s it’s doing the pods, it’s the automation, it’s buying the likes buying the followers. And yes, these things do happen. I don’t know, Jason, if you openly talked about this with other marketers on your podcast, she was one of those things that’s kind of hush hush people kind of, you know, tuck it under the rug, and don’t dress but these things happen. And there are people that have that have built very successful careers, not saying marketing thought leaders, because I think of the marketing thought leadership space, like we’re kind of, we’re dealing with businesses directly. And, you know, most cases, they really kind of don’t care how many followers we would necessarily have on Instagram. But when you start talking about like, your influencers that are working with consumer brands, and doing campaigns and doing content for them, you know, there’s one one instance that comes to mind this one girl forgot her username was but I want to say she like 2 million Instagram followers, and she started up like a T shirt line, and she only sold like 30 shirts, you know,

Jason Falls
That would be Arii. I write about her in my book.

Carlos Gil
Yeah. And, you know, you look an example like that. And I would call that fake influencer. Right, it’s probably safe to say that she probably did some shenanigans to grow her following to that much. She probably does have people that like to follow her because, you know, maybe they like her content. And maybe they they view her as being influential because that vanity metric, but the reality is, she really doesn’t have the influence that she portrays on the surface to have. And once Instagram completely does away with vanity metrics, even follower counts, I think that the game is really going to become predicated based on content and actual true relationships that you have.

Jason Falls
Yeah, I actually spent an entire chapter breaking down what she did wrong in the book influence, which is, you know, comes out early next year. So everybody can check that out, we diagnose Ari’s issue, and I don’t, I would say, you know, basically, you know, because I’ve dug a little bit deeper into it than I think a lot of people I probably know, maybe a little bit more about it. I don’t know that Ari’s problem was that she, you know, astroturf or had a lot of fake followers. I think her problem was, she didn’t have real influence, because she never tried to have influence. She was just basically posting, you know, pee signs and duck lips, and her new outfits, which is fascinating for some people to follow. And that’s fine. But until she launched a T shirt line, or a clothing line, she had never tried to make people do anything. So she didn’t know if she could be effective. And so that’s why it was a big bust, she suddenly said, Hey, instead of just looking at me, why don’t you now buy this T shirt? And people are like, that’s not why we follow you.

Carlos Gil
Yeah, and look, and imposter syndrome is real, you know, if we can talk about this for a moment, like I used to hate the term imposter syndrome. And, you know, I kind of opened up I think, a couple of reasons behind it, or like one, I happen to fall into corporate marketing. I didn’t go to school for this, you know, I’ve made it known publicly in many forums. Before in podcasts, I dropped out of high school and got GED at a young age. And I started my career in banking. And it wasn’t until 2008 that the financial crisis happened that I lost my job in banking, and I started up an online job board. And that’s how I got into this space of social media marketing. And, you know, fortunately, I’ve been able to build a nice career for myself and, you know, make a decent living off of it. But there’s always there was always in the back of my head, like that feeling of like, well, I’m a marketing thought leader, but I really didn’t go to school for marketing, you know, people could kind of call me out on that. Then I went to go work at LinkedIn, my, my career at LinkedIn was very short lived. And there was people in our space that you know, took digs and shots of me for that. So there was always kind of like that imposter syndrome feeling creeping up in my head. And it’s funny because I think you and I, we’ve, we’ve kind of had our low runs on social before. And I think it was justified, you know, it was a different place in my life and career. When you’re younger, you tend to be a little more arrogant and cocky, so you rub people off the wrong way naturally, so I’ll own that. Um, but the older I get, I start realizing Damn, I get why people in the industry took the shots that they took, because there was that imposter syndrome effect and I realized this ironically, Jason when I was writing To end the marketing, because here I am, I’m like midway through writing this book. And as you know, being an author yourself, it’s a grind. And, and unless you’ve actually written a book, I’m not talking about having someone ghost write a book for you actually sitting down with a laptop open and writing. Unless you actually go through the process. You don’t know how grueling it is. And it’s like, physically and emotionally exhausting. And I was like, midway through writing this thing, and one day, I just got writer’s block. And I started doubting myself. And I started saying, in my head, well, what if I don’t sell any copies of this thing? I’ve touted myself and I’ve marketed myself as a marketing thought leader. But what if I can’t actually market a book about marketing about the end of marketing, ironically, and sell copies? Then I’m going to look like the biggest bozo. And the biggest fraud, you know, in our space. And, and no one no one wants to have that that reputation. So I know what it is like to go through these internal struggles or battles, if you will. But what I will say is this success cures all insecurities. And when you see a little bit of success, then you start realizing, okay, I’m now getting the validation that I’ve really been seeking all along. I just didn’t know how to get that validation, I actually had to do some hard work and roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. In order to get that validation. I’ll share another kind of quick example with you. I’m related to you said her name is Ari. Yes. So you know, I, my brother in law and I, we started up a mask company recently called outlaw masks. We started this company up in May. And as we were going through the motions, and as we were getting ready to send out the first email blast to my email list, that feeling cretin, again, of imposter syndrome. Because now I started to say to myself, people know me as a best selling author, and speaker and marketing guru, yada, yada, yada. But what if I came and sell a damn mask, first of all, second, even though we’re in a pandemic, so it’s not hard to sell masks. But what if I can’t sell a damn mask? Second, all these people I’m getting ready to email and like spam all over social media just about they all know me as a marketer. I’ve never once spoken about direct consumer, I’ve never spoken about e commerce, like these are things that are completely foreign. When you look at the content that I post, now, people are gonna be like, What the hell’s this guy doing? Um, again, we launched a business, we’ve sold a lot of masks, thank goodness, and the businesses become profitable. But you know, my whole point in this is I learned comparing myself in the last few months to Ari, that the audience that you market to makes a big, big difference, okay, I didn’t sell out masks to people do social media marketing for a living. In fact, I started to see a lot of unsubscribes from my email newsletter, because there was people that have subscribed to hear me talk about social media marketing, they don’t care. At the end of the day, if I’m having a great day, or a bad day, or whatever happens in my personal life, when I show up in their email inbox, they want to hear about marketing and social media, they don’t want to hear about masks or what I’m doing. And I realized this and when I stopped, this is gonna sound kind of weird. But when I stopped marketing to marketers, and just started marketing, everyday, people have no idea who the hell I am. That’s actually when we started to see success in our business. And we started to see masks, sell, and take off.

Jason Falls
Well, and I applaud you for sharing your thoughts on imposter syndrome. And I would also not only reassure you, but reassure the people listening that we all have it to some degree, I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in those exact, you know, shoes, where I thought, you know, people are gonna call me out for not being qualified to be a thought leader in this to say, what I have to say about this particular topic, you know, and it’s everything from the first time I wrote a blog post wondering if I was qualified to even offer my opinion, on marketing issues, to you know, when I was hired as a vice president at CafePress, which is a publicly traded, you know, e commerce company, I didn’t have any e commerce experience at that time. So who the hell am I? So imposter syndrome is one of those things that I think creeps into everybody, to some degree, to some of us more than others. But ultimately, at the end of the day, you can say fake it till you make it if you want, but I don’t think it’s really a measure of fake it till you make it. You find yourself in the position that you’re in for a reason. Life has led you fate has led you if you want to say God has led you whatever, to where you are for a reason. And you are the most qualified person to be you in that situation. You may have self doubt, but the other people around you who have put you in that situation, don’t have that doubt about you. So, you know, persevere. keep plugging. You know, open your eyes and ears learn, listen, and improve. And typically, I think, you know, as fate would have it, it’s going to work out and you’re eventually going to realize, Oh, yeah, I was cut out for this.

Carlos Gil
Yeah, you know, you’re you’re spot on everything that you just said, Jason, you know, one thing that I would I would add on top of that, and I think a lot of folks in 2020 are kind of getting to rediscover themselves and who they are and what they’re made of, because this year has been very challenging for everyone. You know, with that being said, No one has everything figured out. And I think that our online avatars give off the impression that we, we know it all, we have everything figured out. But everyone’s constantly evolving, then and especially going back to mark the marketing space and social media, you know, we’re in an industry, it’s constantly evolving. And not only is it constantly evolving, but we are at the mercy of the platform’s themselves. Right. And I make light of this in my book on marketing, you know, it’s kind of hard to dominate a platform when you have no control over that platforms algorithm, how that how that platform shares your content, yes. Like, you can know the ins and outs and tips and tricks, and that’s fine. But we are all at the mercy of these platforms. So as professionals, we must always put ourselves in positions to evolve and never get too comfortable or too stagnant. And then, as people outside of our online avatars, we are always evolving. We’re always figuring things out, you know, maybe two, three years ago, I wouldn’t be able to have this conversation with you, because I would have probably been hot headed and be like, you know, this Jason Falls guy called me out on social media, you know, EFF him, but it was also a different different point. Right … in history

Jason Falls
I probably deserve that response too. No big deal.

Carlos Gil
N aw, man. Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s all love, you know. And I think what happens in our space, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. I think what happens in our space is we all want to be heard, we all want to be the guru gurus. And we all have an opinion. And we want our opinion to be the gospel. So I might have a different opinion with you when it comes to influencer marketing. But I’ve also come to the realization that it’s just my opinion, my perspective and compared to someone else’s, and there’s probably going to be truth in both of our perspectives. Oh, yeah.

Jason Falls
Yeah, I go back to you know, in 2008 2009. The, that was the start of the whole social media guru expert debate of whether or not someone could call themselves that. And my I did a, I think there’s even still a YouTube video out there from them where I said this. My response to that has always been Look, if, if if someone wants to call themselves an expert, I personally think that’s a little pretentious, because it’s like saying, I’m good and bad. I don’t know if I’m getting good. That’s someone else’s opinion of me. So that but that’s kind of a that’s semantics. That’s a nuance. What I what I said then, and what I still believe today is the only people who matter in as to whether or not Carlos Gil is an expert, or any other person out there is an expert is their clients, and the people that they that they deal with on a day to day basis. It doesn’t if if if I don’t think Carlos Gil is an expert, which I do, but if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter, because you’re not working for me. And so I think the the the ego that surrounds people in the social media space, especially in the social media marketing bubble of, like you said, I have an opinion and my opinions, right and better than everyone else’s. The ego gets in the way of us understanding it doesn’t really matter what someone else calls themselves, if they can prove that to their clients. Those are the only people who care and those are the only people who should care.

Carlos Gil
You know, you’re absolutely spot on with that, you know, clients are the ones that pay the bills, clients are the ones that their opinion matters the most.

Jason Falls
Okay, real quick. Now you in the marketing space, I think, you know, as an influencer, in the marketing space or overall within different communities. I think you’re probably best known or at least what at one point you were best known for? emerging as being big on Snapchat. I’ve never personally cared for Snapchat. I certainly recognize its relevancy. From your perspective, have have Instagram stories, Facebook stories, and now tik tok taken away from Snapchat a bit Snapchat a bit Is it is it? I don’t want to say is it dying? Because I don’t think that’s the case. But it never seemed to really get through that breakthrough hump. Am I wrong?

Carlos Gil
You’re absolutely spot on. You know, I wouldn’t say it’s dying necessarily. But I’ll tell you someone that at one point had my you know, first brush of fame, if you will, with being an active creator on Snapchat, you know, I haven’t checked this thing in mon span. Um, it’s it’s out of sight out of mind. I have it on my phone as an app. I really don’t check in from what I what I would suspect is that snapchats play. And this is this is something that was awkward about them since day one. They never labeled themselves with social networks. They never really own the position of who they were. They said that they were a camera company. I think a lot of you We’ll call bs on that. They are more of like a micro content hub where you can watch him ESPN SportsCenter in 60 seconds. I think even that concept hasn’t really caught on. Um, you know, yes, Facebook took a lot of market share away from Snapchat a few years ago when they added stories into Instagram. And that was a pivotal moment for me, because I decided to jump ship right back over to where I could get the most amount of reach. And this is something that I caution people all the time. You know, again, Gary Vee is someone who’s very well known very well admired and respected. So people tend to listen to what he says is the gospel. And people will tend to go run to the next new shiny object, when Gary says, like, Hey, this is this is getting ready to be hot, go over there. And that’s not from my standpoint, the right methodology, I feel that you can get more value by tapping into an already existing resource that has all the tools and infrastructure that you need, then go try something new. I’ll give you an example. My brother in law and I, we recently joined Tech Talk, we’ve had a few videos go viral on tech toxin. Now we believe 1,000%. In Tech Talk, we just joined recently, a new social network called triller, which is basically a tick tock clone. And we’ve done these A B tests and the same videos that we put on Tick Tock that have gained hundreds of thousands of views have gained less than 100. Because the audience isn’t really there. So while Yeah, we could say that we’re first to market to something. The reality is that there’s there’s no one there paying attention. And that’s that’s the catch 22 of chasing a new social network. But you know, going back to Snapchat, you know, I think that people, you know, when I say people very loosely, you know, our audience, the business marketing community, we never really looked at it as being taken serious because it didn’t have all the tools and bells and whistles to Instagram. And I think Snapchat is just a little too late to the party.

Jason Falls
But put on your influencer hat for a minute out there. What advice would you give to influencers? Who trying to grow their business through influence content, brand partnerships and whatnot? What what are they doing right these days? What are they doing wrong? What can everyone learn from you?

Carlos Gil
Such a good question. First and foremost, you need to capture your own data. That would be like the number one objective or priority that any influencer out there needs to do. Capture email addresses, have your own comm that people go to with your own tracking pixel that you can run retargeting ads. If you’re not doing that you are literally on borrowed time, you are you’re operating a business that has an internal ticking time bomb that could go off at any moment and explode and your whole business can be gone. Like, you know, even look at Tick tock, you know, most recently there there was rumblings that you know, tick tock was gonna get shut down, what do you do, if your whole business revolves around Tick tock, you got no business, you know, it’s done. You know, party’s over. And I’ve met a lot of YouTubers throughout the years are very passionate about their communities, and Snapchat influencers and instagramers and have told all of them guys, girls, don’t get married to these platforms, do not label yourself as a YouTuber or instagrammer. You are a creator. You are platform agnostic. The platform is what you use as a medium to distribute content. But platform does not make you On the contrary, you make the platform. And that’s, that’s my mentality that I’ve I’ve had since 2008. When I got on here at 25. And I start building a brand for myself. Like, if these social networks went away tomorrow, people know how to hear from Carlos Gil, I will find a way to get in touch with you, like my brand lives on outside of these mediums. But I think especially the younger influencers, they don’t get it yet because they haven’t really felt pain or hurt yet. You know, ask any creator that was big on Vine. What happened when vine went away? Ask them like any influencer listening to this right now. Okay, go find someone that wants me to living by and ask them how they had to pivot. It was very hard. You know, a lot of them haven’t recovered. A lot of them went away. I loved vine as a platform. And I used to follow a lot of creators on their various thing you came in find these people anymore anywhere, because it just seems like their careers just died. So I would say what you really need to focus on is building that, that audience on your own.com. Maybe you can create your own paywall ad say what creators what I do see they do really well. I think marketers do a very poor job at and this is the yin and the yang is they know how to work their community. They know how to get their community to take action. Like I have friends that are creators that they know how to speak to the community in a way that they want their community to take action, go do something, they’re going to go do it. They also work at the comments. They work the direct messages like they’re married to the community. If you see if you Really get to understand, you know influencer marketing from the inside and creatives. They’re not spreading themselves thin by being everywhere. And again, I think the mistake that we as social media marketers make is we want to have that thought leadership voice, ie the ego. We want that to be spread everywhere. creatives are selective. Like typically you’ll find a YouTuber that’s all in on YouTube, maybe has a presence on Instagram, but they’re not like playing around the Twitter pool. They’re definitely not playing around in the LinkedIn or Facebook pool, either. Right?

Jason Falls
Right. Great advice, Carlos. I really appreciate your time. And I know that people will enjoy continuing to learn from you as you are omnipresent on whatever network is is going to be working for you or reaching your community at that point. Really appreciate your time and thanks for spending some time with us.

Carlos Gil
Thank you so much for the opportunity Jason.

Transcribed by otter.ai

The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.

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