Secure your place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25
VaynerMedia CEO Vaynerchuk: Media, creative agencies must reunite to create ‘common sense’ marketing solutions
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.”
Other video interviews at Possible
Ryan Detert, CEO of Influential
Alejandra Salazar, founder and CEO, CROING
Laura Jones, CMO, Instacart
Harry Kargman, founder and CEO, Kargo
More in Media Buying
Media Buying Briefing: Overheard at DMBS Spring 2026: AI from the top to the bottom of agencies
The Town Halls revealed the most about the challenges and solutions media agencies face with integrating AI systems and processes into workflows
The Rundown: Ad tech’s performance in 2025 was overshadowed by AI concerns and Big Tech
Despite revenue increases, the markets were brutal but reports over talks with OpenAI proved later upside.
As brands respond to AI search, walls crumble between paid and organic
Agencies are knitting SEO and PPC teams closer together as they adapt to the new rules of search that are driven by the use of generative AI.