VaynerMedia CEO Vaynerchuk: Media, creative agencies must reunite to create ‘common sense’ marketing solutions

By Jim Cooper • April 16, 2024 • 2 min read •

Laid out in pretty stark terms, VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, on the first day of the Possible conference in Miami on Monday, advocated for a reconciliation of media and creative agencies to create a more common sense approach to media and marketing that many of the companies in attendance at the conference, he said, remain loath to embrace.

“I believe the modern marketing comms strategy should be predicated on common sense and a lot less on boardroom behavior,” said Vaynerchuk, adding, “I was looking at the list of attendees on the flight down here and, respectfully, a lot of the companies that are here are trading on fake mathematical proxies of marketing vs. actual marketing.”

Vaynerchuk went on to say that the media and marketing business need to have a better understanding of where consumer attention is and reorient traditional marketings practices in concert with AI and big tech to “create creative that consumers will consider vs. industry creative.”

Vaynerchuk also discussed the peril of underestimating the importance of social organic creative as the real starting point of meaningful marketing campaigns and, in his opinion, the poor job the industry does about having the conversation about what media impressions are actually being consumed.

“We talk a lot about numbers, but a lot of times those numbers are predicated on maybe or potentially vs. actual,” he said.

The reunification of creative and media agencies, Vaynerchuk said, can help solve for a lot of the industry’s self imposed and internally focused pain points.

“There is a real opportunity here to bring creative and media back together again, under one roof — not a holding company — and ask agency, partners, or platform partners, or technology partners to prove real ROI on the business results and not the reports that look good in the boardroom.”