Gary Vaynerchuk on Why Creative, Not Media, Is the Real Growth Engine

0:00The problem for everybody who's listening here is creative, not media. It's media when they plan it poorly and they treat it on awareness and its potential awareness versus actualized awareness. Media is always at the scene of the crime. It always gets blamed when the campaign doesn't go well. And yet creative is the biggest determinant of all of this.

0:24As a marketer, it sometimes feels like we're living in two different industries at once. There's the one in the decks, full of clean metrics, tidy frameworks, and legacy playbooks. And then there's the one unfolding in the real world, where culture shifts by the hour and algorithms rewrite themselves overnight. Hi, I'm Josh Bania, VP of AI and Marketing Strategy at Google, and welcome to Frontier CMO. Today's guest is someone who refuses to market in theory. Gary Vaynerchuk has built his entire career around actual attention, where it is, how it moves and why most brands are still missing it. In this conversation, Gary and I get into why so many CMOs are struggling, why creative is still the biggest variable of success, and why the split between math people and brand people is hurting everyone.

1:12We also look ahead. AEO and generative search, production of AI scale, the coming shift from phones to glasses, and what it really means to build relevance at speed across dozens of audience segments. If you care about where the frontier of marketing is and where it's going, this episode is for you. Here's my conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk.

1:37In the last week, I started a new social channels for myself on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram. I'm really into watches. I'm trying to post every day inspired by you. And it's kind of hard and scary, but you know, it's a start. A couple of things. I'm wildly humbled, flattered. Two, this couldn't be more exciting for me because I believe that there's a substantial separation right now between marketers that are in the trenches and are tasting reality versus marketers who have worked really hard to get to where they are, but are in a place where they're a little removed from the reality and it's more theory and academia than truth.

2:22And I have a funny feeling this watch work will teach you so much more than you can imagine. And I will say, no question, it's the biggest reason our firm became so large is that its CEO and founder is a daily practitioner of the craft. So I'm kind of fascinated by marketing. I have been. My whole career has been in marketing, largely inside of large agencies working for large customers. What the heck is the role of a CMO today in 2025 and going into 2026? Like you work with them all the time. What's the role? I mean, the role is very clear to me. I think marketing is the most interesting and fascinating part of business.

3:01You know, I'm a sports fan. I like the offense. I think I get the defense wins championships. And I think that's the CFO who's listening right now. They deserve credit, right? You can't go out of business. You can't spend it all. But, you know, I think the role is to create growth, right? And to create consideration. I think we're CMOs and truly my life today, because I've been in the business for 15 years running this agency. And I pretty much my work is one of the best parts of my life. We as CMO people like to complain about people overvaluing the math. And I think we as CMO people are right to some degree.

3:34It can't all be math. It is math and art. We all know that. But I think we have to look ourselves in the mirror and realize the role of the CMO is to be a little bit more clear about what we do and the value we bring, because it's definitely not a great temperature right now out there. And it's both ways. Let me go. Let me throw you for a curveball. A lot of the CMOs that are a little bit on the hot seat in my life right now are actually performance math driven CMOs. They've been incredible at using the incredible platform that Google Inc is. They've been incredible in using some of the best meta and other stuff, but they're actually missing a little bit of the romance, the consideration, the little risk, the little creativity.

4:14And then we have a whole nother fleet of CMOs, often many of which get the accolades and top 50 CMOs in the world and all that, that are on the hot seat because it's all a little too fluffy. And it's about this TVC spot or this random campaign. And the business people that are held accountable and are scared, the CFO and CEO and board members are just kind of tired of it. And so I think the role of the CMO is to be on the offense, to create business results, and to understand how to make art and math work together to create a business outcome and how to make that very easily understood by common sense business folk.

4:51And I think that has been missing in the last decade. And I think we need more of it. I just want to go back a couple of minutes. You said your marketing philosophy and that you have great friends and CMOs who don't follow your marketing philosophy, just expand upon what is it for you that great marketers need to be doing, embracing? What's your philosophy on all this? My philosophy is based on day trading attention and business outcomes, not fake reports and proxies. Okay. So let me break that down. Day trading attention, I'll put to the side because I have to explain that a little more. The second one should be very easy.

5:26I have struggled with our beautiful industry from the day I entered 15 years ago because I could not understand anybody's explanation on MMMs, MMAs, GRPs. I listened very carefully. I'm no bozo. I didn't have any interest in not believing in it. In fact, it would have been lovely to have something that was a black and white scorecard. I could not believe how many people justified all of their marketing spend based on winning CanLions, both on the agency and the brand side. So my philosophies are that media and creative then production should be under one roof, that they had it right in 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1987, 91, 92, and then it started going away, that Leo Burnett and Starcom should come back together and be one agency, and that would allow American Airlines or Taco Bell or whoever worked with them a lot more clarity that is Leo Burnett's star doing a good job for us or not a good job for us, okay?

6:25I think all of marketing should be measured based on business results, both short and long term. I consider short term one year. If an agency, Josh, has the media and the creative for a client, I do believe that a client should be seeing some result by the end of one year of working together in some direction. right? I'm a businessman first, comma, marketer. But I do believe that we need marketing to go back to more merit, truth-based, not awards and reports. Influencers. If you bought Alex Earl and Charlie D 'Amelio and Logan Paul and Emma Chamberlain when we at VaynerMedia told you to do it, it was a steal.

7:05They were pennies on the dollar. If you're buying them today when they're repped by UTA or CAA, you've got a problem. They're going to be expensive. The problem for everybody who's listening here is creative, not media. It's media when they plan it poorly and they treat it on awareness and it's potential awareness versus actualized awareness. I'll get into that in a minute. But the biggest issue for everyone, Joshua, is creative. So it's funny you say that. I started my career in media, spent many years doing it, and it always felt like in the maxim of detective shows is always, you know, the murder is always at the scene of the crime, They always return to the scene of the crime.

7:43Media is always at the scene of the crime. It always gets blamed when the campaign doesn't go well. And yet creative is the biggest determinant of all of this. creative is the variable of success. Media's current problem that was not the problem in 1975 and 1984 is way too many media agencies sell potential reach, not actualized reach. PR agencies drive me crazy. I love them. But when they come into the IAT and they're like, we got 84 million impressions last month. I'm like, guys, you're multiplying on multiplying on multiplying. Do we really believe a mention in Huffington blog post got us 80?

8:18You know, it's so hyperbolized, but it fits the MMM. The company is willing to accept the measurement and we're getting caught up on the measurement of it all. So media's biggest problem for me right now when they're at the scene of the crime is 100 % when they're selling reach and frequency that is not actually being achieved. If you put your common sense hat on, you're just buying reports on face value. Yeah, so opportunity to see is not opportunity to act, not actually opportunity to sell. It's just a metric. Why YouTube pre-roll is so brilliant is if you're a creative shop like us that understands you have to win the first two seconds, you could actually get them to watch the whole thing.

9:01You know this the way I know it. 80, 90 % of the creative on YouTube is taken from other places, not made for YouTube pre-roll. Thus, it doesn't do well. It gets skipped. A hundred percent. And yeah, there isn't a third second on meta. Like you've got two seconds and then you're done. But let me just ask you, because there is so much there you spoke on, I could unpack. But what is the playbook for, and I'm going to give you a couple of examples. I understand Liquid Death. I understand a brand built and you're intimate with that brand. You have helped fund it. But Liquid Death's social strategy, the way they've approached things, brilliant, incredible.

9:38What is the playbook for Goldman Sachs? Stayed, safe, reliable, not looking for controversy. How does Goldman Sachs approach activating in social the way you're talking about? By realizing that LinkedIn is the B2B world's TikTok. I could not explain to you how bullish I am on LinkedIn creative. I can literally reach every CIO of every Fortune 500 company on LinkedIn. And I reach them more likely than if I did CNBC or Wall Street Journal because of how much actual consumption happens actually in feed, actually in LinkedIn. But then Goldman still has to make good creative for LinkedIn or any platform.

10:15It's got to be engaging and interesting. Otherwise, that's right. Liquid death can be irreverent and troll everyone. Goldman can't. Goldman has 30 different business units that are meaningful to them. And all of them need to show up in that LinkedIn. And all of them can talk about wealth management, investing, diversification in a crypto world, AI opportunity, fundraising, selling, banking. I mean, there's an incredible audience, right, of many different people. But to your point, let's use Goldman. If Goldman's trying to win a deal to take public from an emerging company that is only less than 10 years old, their LinkedIn content needs to over index with a pretty young person normally who grew up in a TikTok, you know, kind of like the world we just all lived in.

10:59So you may have a little sense of irreverence in that creative, not silly, not, oh, my God, Goldman's like the boring banker that showed up to the hot club in Brooklyn and they're out of place, but just a little wink, maybe a cultural reference that might matter about. I'll give you an example. Goldman definitely can reference Labubu talking about short bubbles of value. Right. Now, I just said something that I just know many people aren't thinking about enough yet. So we have an acronym internally at Vayner called PAC. platforms, algorithms, and culture. When we make creative at scale for every client, we always think about this stuff when we make creative.

11:38We have to know what's going on with the platform. So like what are the features, for example, LinkedIn, are carousel ads over indexing video? Is long form written copy working? Back to day trading, Josh, I don't think a lot of people realize these algorithms and platforms change a lot, often, a lot. And that's what's hurting a classic creative agency, they want to sit for six months on a brief and come up with an idea. We're hands on keyboards and creating daily. And that is where I think a lot of brands are missing the mark. They're doing too much matching luggage and matching wallpaper. And they're not realizing that it's relevance at scale with as many different consumer segmentations taking advantage of the distribution and the algorithms that really will grow their market share in their business.

12:20Especially in social. I remember when the, this is a very old reference, but I happened to be at that game. It was the first Super Bowl I ever got to go to back in 2012. It was the Blackout Bowl in New Orleans. Oh, the Oreo. The Oreo. Yeah, there was the Oreo one. But that was unbelievably relevant to that context. But there were a load of other brands which were tweeting about the Blackout with no connection to it whatsoever. And it completely disappeared and pointless. Whereas that Oreo one was actually fun. And there was a relevance to it. Two things. One, within three minutes of that post being posted, I sent a company-wide email.

12:55We were three years old. And I literally sent an email that said, titled, our company has changed forever. Because we were already on that boat of what relevant creative in social meant. I knew in that moment that that was the moment that people were gonna be like, wait a minute, there's something here. Number two, what's important about the posts that meant nothing was that cost every brand$17, right? If Michelin made a post on Instagram, and tried to ride the wave of that moment. The true cost against that was hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands. We as big brands, Fortune 500 land, will spend millions on campaigns at a rate of 99 % failure and have no problem with it.

13:40But we are asking of social to do things with much smaller budgets that we're not asking television, print, or outdoor to do. And I find that hilarious, comma, sad, comma, misguided and so off strategy, which is why so many of the Fortune 5000 are being disrupted by the emerging 50 ,000 because they are outflanking us with understanding what's happening in organic social. in organic social when i post on youtube shorts if it does well that algorithm is written on relevance the issue is creative agencies are not built for production that is needed in this social environment which is why i will make one of the big statements in this podcast i believe that production along with creative and media should be integrated under one roof from agencies i now talk internally at Vayner that we're a production company that happens to do media, creative, and strategy.

14:46And I believe that brands are paying three companies currently today, media, creative, and production people to make the creatives ideas. And I believe within the next half decade, many will follow us and that company will be one company that does production, creative, media, and strategy under one roof. So one of the things inside of Google Marketing, we've been talking about endlessly for the last three years and will continue to talk about is who does the work in AI-powered work? Are we doing it? Is an agency doing which agency? What are we going to hybridize? What are we going to bring in-house?

15:19And it's forcing and has forced a fundamental reshift. And with Nano Banana and with Vio and Flow, all the tools we have, it is so accelerating and actually empowering our younger marketers because they feel they can do better work than the agencies. In fact, are often doing better work than the agencies because they're lent into the tools, they're understanding culture, they're closer to our brand. So this is an ongoing debate and I don't think we've fully cracked it yet, but it's very exciting. It's incredibly exciting. First of all, let me just, you know, I always like to be a gracious guest, but this is a real pleasure.

15:50Nano is so crazy. It is. And to think what it's going to be in three years, the latest update is incredible. And let me give you the answer because I really am happy to put my name on this. And if I'm wrong, I'll own it. The answer is whomever's better. If there's external agencies that are better at getting views achieved, it'll be them. If it's internal teams, it'll be them. If it's agentic AI bots, it'll be them. We believe that there's other production needs. Look what we're doing right now. For example, we as a creative agency, so us as a widening Kennedy and as an anomaly and as a droga five, also do podcast production, also do live shopping production, right?

16:31Also do experiential production. So we've built a lot of capabilities in the real world. And then in the digital, creative and media world, we continue to outperform. But there may be a day where we lose to the robots or we lose consistently to internal teams. Or, you know, I think right now, and this is I'm saying this to the agencies because I actually don't view agencies as competitors. I actually think we're part of a community and we need to lift each other up. I believe one of the big mistakes right now by the holding company agencies is they're positioning themselves as tech. and I think companies like yourselves and the other real tech companies are laughing.

17:08I think clients are getting, not tricked, but are leaning into it right now, but I don't think it's going to end well because I think you and your seven big hyperscaling competitors are going to build better technology with all due respect to these great holding companies, and so I think the winners of the next generation are going to be the most creative and strategic people on earth and the people that do great work in real life production. And so we're positioned for that. We're excited about that. Let me just ask, you may have already started to answer this, but if you were starting VaynerMedia, your agency today, if you're rebuilding agency today, launching today, how would you structure the agency?

17:51What would you be challenging the agency to do now brilliantly? You know, it's funny. I believe the reason we're successful and I want to stay this way forever, but I might lose a step. we'll see is I'm trying to put myself out of business every day. I think the biggest reason agencies have really consolidated and fell is they didn't innovate, right? You know this, you grew up in this. The idea of being a media planner and just pressing a couple buttons and be like, hey, client, spend all your money this way. Or on the creative side, let's spend seven weeks making a deck and pitch the big idea that I can prompt engineer right now.

18:23I can type in, hey, I'm pitching Heinz Ketchup. Give me seven good. I mean, it's crazy. I think there's three major trends every consumer brand that's listening to this will have to reconcile with immediately. Number one, live shopping. Now, anyone who does business in China already knows this is real. Everybody else is learning it's about to be very real. Every one of my CPG clients, we feel like we're the best live shopping strategy and production execution partner. So I am building and have been building for the last 18 months those capabilities internally. I've literally spent the last 12 months building an agency from scratch because I don't know what the ultimate outcome of the AI revolution is and I need to hedge my bet.

19:07So podcast production is made every brand needs to be an experiential live shopping and what I would call podcast production immediately in the real world. I believe every B2B and every B2C should treat every experiential execution as a production day for social creative. So I think that right now, a lot of our clients, my clients are paying an experiential agency and a creative agency and a production agency. And I think that should happen under one roof. So we're doing that a lot more for clients. Starting Vayner from scratch is what I do every year. When I'm on holiday, I will be thinking through how to start Vayner from scratch.

19:45But I've put in a lot of work this year on experiential, live shopping, podcasting, ponder prompt post. So all of our creatives are very prepared for a full AI world in a real way. Obviously, a lot of clients are concerned about AI creative legalities, consumer pushback and blowback, but we're kind of ready when our clients are. So another advancement for us is we're making more$50 ,000 to$100 ,000 production videos that we post organically. We do believe that in two years, next year, next week, a lot of that will be done on Nano. I really actually believe in a full AI state, we will still see brands at some level of subconscious humanity do both real life and AI.

20:31Even if real life productions are 10%, I still think you'll see that. But the best of the best are the only ones that are going to survive. Plus one to all of that. You've talked about a whole variety of new technologies. You've also said, and I heard on one of your recent podcasts, everything is a commodity apart from brand. I'd love for you to expand about that. I'm just thinking about all these different surfaces, all these different technologies, all this different content, all this different AI and nano banana pumping it all out. But ultimately, it's all commodity if you don't have the brand right.

21:03Just expand a little more on that, please. The ability to communicate, garner attention, and then have someone feel something and know something about you, personal or your brand, is the leverage point going forward. Now, I don't want OG marketers to lose their way with brand is the only thing because they're going to treat brand in the academia sense of the early 90s, that everything has to be conducive, matching luggage, you know, all the stuff that's hurting everyone right now. Yep. So for example, let's use Nike because it's a great one to use. What does it make you feel? It's sporting excellence, amazing visuals and just the best technology to help you do whatever you're doing, whether you're Usain Bolt or a plucky amateur runner like me.

21:50Nike for me, streetwear brand that makes me feel cool in contemporary culture from a fashion lens. That was real, by the way. That was my real answer. That was your real answer. Yep. Now what? This is my challenge to everyone who wants to be an academic. Here are two gentlemen. Forget about our marketing backgrounds or who we are or whatever. How about just two dudes? We're just two guys. And we just actually gave our answers. I just want everyone to know it's also App Leisure sweatpants brand for a lot of outlet store buyers across this country, right? Right. It is very important for everyone to understand that brands can mean different things to people.

22:33Josh, do you have siblings? I have two brothers. Amazing. Do you think that your father, is your father alive, Josh? I apologize for intruding. My father has passed. I'm sorry. How old were you guys when your father passed? I was about 20. Great. And your brothers? My elder brother was two years older. My younger is five years younger. So they were 22 and 15. First, I'm so sorry. My father lost his father at 15. It's been a big factor in my life. Josh, what your father represented to all three of you, especially that he passed at such a young age is different yes or no yes that's how i feel about brand i need everyone here to listen that brand just needs to i have a funny feeling especially the fact that you dealt with such adversity three boys losing him so early i have a funny feeling your dad means a lot to all three of you but i also know he means something different to all of you that is brand and that is where we've lost our way we think that it needs to mean the same exact thing to everyone that is ludicrous and that is hurting our business growth.

23:38Apple, Nike, Big League Chew, Gucci, Dove Soap, they're allowed to mean different things to different people. I'll give you an example. Kellogg's Corn Flakes means everything to me because it was the one luxury that my mother could afford because we were immigrants and we were dirt poor and it meant America to me. And when I literally walk down the aisle of a cereal aisle and see that rooster, I get literally emotional. I have a funny feeling that's not most people's story with Kellogg's Corn Flakes that are listening right now. But that's what I mean. What I mean is it's like religion. It's like love.

24:16It comes in many form factors. And we've lost our way in the last 30 years trying to bottle it up into one sentence and matching luggage. And I'm in board meetings where people are like, well, that's not funny. And we stand for funny. And then the brand manager changes and they have a different temperament of what's funny. And we need to face ourselves as an industry about this. We have limited our brand's breadth. And what I mean by brand is you feel something. The way you feel something is when something is relevant to you, the end. And relevance requires many different touch points, many different form factors and iterations.

24:54One of the things that I'm excited about, and think about Frontier CMO, which is the name of this podcast, is the opportunity the CMO of Kellogg has to speak to so many more audiences and produce assets at low cost or high production value to those audiences to widen the pool and the relationship and the resonance so that there can be Kellogg for people who remember it from their childhood and Kellogg Corn Flakes for people who don't eat it today, but need a dinner snack. My kids like eating cereal in the evening. Why can't Corn Flakes be the snack of choice for Twitch streamers that play video games?

25:34It could if you make relevant content and do something with clicks and get off that equity. Look, VaynerMedia was just a little blip in the history of advertising that was really a human-based organization that was a preview to what AI creative was going to do. You're absolutely right. We won because there was just a couple dozen people that believed that relevance at scale to as many different consumer segmentations was going to drive their business instead of academia written in the 90s of how brands grow. A few weeks ago, I was in a room with 50 chief financial officers, could you not, 50 CFOs, and they were at an event put on by Google.

26:17And if you were in that room speaking to the CFOs, and I'm going back way earlier in our conversation when you said the MMMs, the metrics, it's not credible, unbelievable. What do you say to the CFO who is the hard-nosed, data-driven quant who wants to know marketing's impact? How do you pitch them in a way which is credible without that data science? Or maybe you have it in other ways. I will tell you, this may blow your mind. Okay. But this is dead serious. I have much higher affinity from CFOs in Fortune 500s than CMOs. Interesting. And let me tell you why. It's the answer to your question.