Gary Vaynerchuk slams brands’ reliance on paid over organic social

As promised by the “no-holds-barred” descriptor of his Q&A keynote session at Possible on Monday, serial entrepreneur and agency founder Gary Vaynerchuk wrapped the first day of the Miami marketing conference by lambasting several ad industry norms in a room packed with advertisers. Vaynerchuk—CEO of creative and media agency VaynerMedia and chairman of its parent company, VaynerX—particularly zeroed in on brands’ overreliance on paid media on social platforms rather than investing in organic social content. Before opening the discussion to audience questions, he kicked off the Q&A session with a fiery (and explicit) six-minute rant about how “working media dollars have been used to disguise bad creative” for decades instead of “amplify[ing] good creative.” “For 70 years, we have been guessing in war rooms, through our egos and our politics, on what the campaign or commercial should be, and then spend an ungodly amount of money disguising that it was probably a piece of shit,” Vaynerchuk said during the session. “And now, [on social media], we can post at scale with content that is relevant, see that human beings—not us in the industry—care about it, and have the ability to amplify it or campaign on top of it.” Yet, according to Vaynerchuk, major brands are largely putting their social media budgets toward boosting content that many consumers will likely flick past while scrolling on social media rather than producing engaging organic social content from the start. Brands should be reversing that approach entirely, and amplifying social posts that have already “been affirmed with organic reach,” he added. “Any Fortune 500 company that is not remarkably overinvesting in organic social media creative is making a fundamental strategic mistake,” Vaynerchuk said. He pointed to Chili’s and Abercrombie & Fitch as examples of brands that have recently seen dramatic boosts in sales, particularly among Gen Z and millennial consumers, driven by their organic social media strategies. Also read: NFL CMO talks reaching younger consumers at Possible Gary V sounds off on Cannes Lions awards Vaynerchuk also triggered a wave of murmuring throughout the audience when he denounced the Cannes Lions awards as “f–king horseshit,” stating that agencies shouldn’t shape the marketing strategies they pitch to brands based on how likely they are to put them in the running for one of the prestigious advertising awards. “I get the bullshit reports that justify all our behavior in this industry—the MMMs [media mix modeling], the MMAs [marketing mix analysis] and the f–king horseshit Cannes Lions and everything else,” he said. “I get it. But there’s not one f–king person in here that has a half a brain that doesn’t know that I’m 100% right” about the importance of effective organic social content. He continued: “I do not view us [agencies] competing. I view us as an industry in a crisis where if you do not not prove value, you will not exist … So, either we learn the new craft, which is knowing how to make creative that actually gets views, not the production value of an $800,000 video that nobody’s gonna watch, or we will die—both the agencies and the brands.” Vaynerchuk also told the audience he starts conversations with CEOs and chief marketing officers by urging them to put 20% of their overall marketing budgets toward creative production on social media. Newer, digital-native brands regularly outspend much larger and more-established brands in the realm of organic social content, which is “the most important channel in marketing today,” he said. Instead, he quipped, those major brands are “spending $900,000 throwing a f–king party at Possible.”

Gary Vaynerchuk slams brands’ reliance on paid over organic social

Featured Stories