Gary Vaynerchuk said he's not predicting the future, it just seems that way.
The 49-year-old CEO and media personality was an early investor in Facebook and built a YouTube audience in the early 2000s by posting daily. This was unusual at the time. His visionary predictions have made him and his company, Vayner Media, a favorite employer of Fortune 500 companies such as JPMorgan and PepsiCo.
But rather than speculating about the next big thing, Vaynerchuk looks at what's working in one corner of the world, the Internet, and wonders if it can and will scale. He claims to be considering it.
“I'm just reacting very quickly to what's going on rather than speculating what's going to happen,” Vaynerchuk told the Post.
Here he shares three major trends on the technology and business horizon.
live social media shopping it will explode
Vaynerchuk believes that the QVCization of social media – people using TikTok and Instagram to instantly click and buy what they see without leaving the app – will explode in 2025. Masu.
“I think social shopping is going to be a monster,” he said with enthusiasm.
Live television shopping networks, such as QVC and HSN, have been popular for decades and still generate billions of dollars in revenue annually. Now, social media influencers are taking the same format and modernizing it.
“I think retail is going to pivot to QVC in a very big way,” Vaynerchuk said.
Live shopping on social media has already exploded in China, generating billions of dollars in revenue. Influencer Zheng Xiangxiang earns an estimated weekly salary of $14 million From clothing to mugs, it only takes 3 seconds to display inexpensive items. Her followers can buy instantly by simply tapping a button on the screen.
“Tens and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of live shopping is happening right now,” Vaynerchuk explained. “But that's not what happened 95% of the time.” [of the world] I still know — in fact, I only know 5% of it. ”
Influencers and podcasters need to adapt to AI or be left behind
As technology becomes more sophisticated, artificial intelligence will replace influencers, podcasters and other content creators next year, Vaynerkczuk said.
Google's new program NotebookLM allows users to upload any article or book and instantly turn it into a podcast. Other startups like PixAI, SoulGenAI, and Glambase allow anyone to create an artificial intelligence influencer from scratch.
But Vaynerchuk emphasizes that smart content creators don't have to worry about being replaced by new technology. Rather, they will find smart ways to use it to their advantage and “weaponize the opportunity rather than lament it.”
The best thing anyone can do right now, he suggests, is to create an AI library of videos, articles, and designs that will help them use AI to their benefit more efficiently.
“When tractors came out, many years ago, there was a lot of talk in society about how this was a bad thing because 83% of people in the world work on farms,” he says. “What people didn't understand was that tractors enable people to do bigger and better things.”
NFT not completely dead
While the initial craze for non-fungible tokens (better known as NFTs) may be over and many are now worthless, Vaynerchuk says they still have utility. That's what I think.
“A non-fungible token is an irreplaceable contract that will never burn up in a building or disappear from the face of the earth,” said an entrepreneur who sold NFTs at their peak. The 2021 popularity will help fund his new members-only flyfish club.
Vaynerchuk believes the technology behind NFTs, the blockchain on which they are recorded, is good enough that they will make a comeback.
“Blockchain is deep… and I think that's where assets and digital assets end up as well,” he said, adding that blockchain could be used to authenticate luxury goods, track goods in supply chains and store documents indefinitely. he pointed out.
“My great-grandmother used to say…her family had a 500-acre farm, but it was taken over by the Bolsheviks and gone,” he said. “If the deed remains on the blockchain, someday my great-grandchildren will be able to take ownership of the land.”
This article is part of a new editorial series called NYNext, which focuses on innovation across various industries in New York City and the people leading the way.
