Gary Vaynerchuk built his name telling CMOs they were wrong. Now he’s telling their CFOs instead

“By far the people that believe in what we’re doing are CFOs more than CMOs,” he said at the inaugural Modern Marketing Leaders Summit 2026 event his company hosted in London on Monday (Feb. 23). “It’s not even close. There’s literally no CFO meeting that I don’t have where, within the first 45 minutes, she or he’s like ‘OK, yes, this’.”

The observation points to a broader shift playing out inside large organizations. As pressure mounts on marketing departments to demonstrate measurable returns, finance leaders — historically peripheral to media strategy conversations — are becoming more central to them. Several agency executives have noted a similar pattern over the past two years, describing more frequent contact with CFOs seeking to scrutinize how advertising budgets are structured and what they produce.

For Vaynerchuk, whose agency counts Pepsi and Unilever among its clients, the explanation is straightforward: CFOs are simply better positioned to recognize what isn’t working. 

“We are losing credibility as marketers by showing up to these meetings with fake data,” he said. “I spend most of my time with the boards of the companies you work at. And our industry is, if anything, great at creating fake data.”

It’s a grievance with a long history. Vaynerchuk recalled his very first client meeting — at Campbell Soup, shortly after founding VaynerMedia — where an agency presented what he described as triumphant impression figures while the company’s business was declining sharply. After sitting through 25 minutes of celebration, he raised his hand. “Just curious,” he told the room. “If everything sounds so awesome, why is the business declining so much?” The response, he said, was silence. His conclusion: “Maybe the reports are wrong.” Nearly two decades later, he argues, the dynamic hasn’t fundamentally changed — only the scale of the waste has grown. He described clients whose businesses had been in decline for seven, ten, 13 years while their measurement infrastructure continued to report success.

In the intervening years, his criticism of that mindset has growth but his language at the event was sharper than usual. He described an industry still allocating the majority of its working media against creative that has never been tested in market, and relying on measurement frameworks — brand lift studies, Gross Ratings Points (GRP) models, impression reports — that he argues obscure rather than illuminate business performance. 

“Nobody could explain how a GRP was really measured,” he added. “People spent all their working media dollars on potential reach, not actualized reach. Common sense had no permission to be in the boardroom.”

That framing, it turns out, resonates more cleanly with finance executives than with marketing ones — and Vaynerchuk acknowledged he has begun structuring his business development accordingly. “I’m doing more CFO meetings lately,” he said, “because of this reality.”

The dynamic creates an uncomfortable situation for CMOs. If the most persuasive internal advocate for a new approach to marketing investment is sitting in the finance function rather than the marketing department, it raises questions about where strategic influence over media spend is migrating, and whether marketing leadership is driving that conversation or being pulled into it by someone else. Vaynerchuk, who counts several Fortune 500 CMOs among his closest friends, didn’t spare them. He said he reminds them regularly that the short tenures and boardroom credibility problems CMOs complain about are, in his view, largely self-inflicted.

“We cry about the lack of respect or the short tenures of the CMO,” he said. “And I remind some of my dearest friends that it is their fault.”

Vaynerchuk, characteristically, didn’t soften the point either.

“There’s a lot coming, and there’s a lot of angst in the system,” he said. “You want to be on the right side of history in your boardrooms over the next 12 to 18 months. It will benefit your career.” 

The implication being that not everyone in the room would be.