Gary Vaynerchuk doesn’t pull any punches in rousing ANA talk
Gary Vaynerchuk, wine entrepreneur turned CEO of digital agency VaynerMedia, gave attendees at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando a break from the usual CMO case study presentations by telling them how he truly feels about the industry and why he thinks it's primed to fail if things don’t change.
Credit: Clarion Pictures
One of his main gripes with the industry concerns the prevalence of TV ads. During his talk, he discussed his frustration with brands that spend more than half of their budgets on 30-second videos that play in between television shows.
“If you are running a commercial for a brand and the target audience is 22 and under, you’re a fuckface,” he said. “The problem is, we have a process right now that was made from 1950 to 2000. There’s a new world. Attention is in different places. I could care less if Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat exist tomorrow. I just care about where your attention is.”
He used the opportunity to plug recent work his agency did with Sour Patch Kids. He said that once the candy brand – which sells to the 12-18 age group – stopped pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into commercials and invested that money into Instagram, Snapchat, creative and influencers instead, it experienced 60% growth in sales.
Despite his frustration with the industry’s obsession with television, Vaynerchuk said he believes that buying a Super Bowl ad is the greatest buy in the world.
“I believe that the number one underpriced value of attention in today’s marketing world is the Super Bowl,” he said. “Because every single person watches it, whether they watch it during the game or on YouTube the week before. The problem with the current execution of Super Bowl is the creative has so much vested interest in being a showcase for agencies for new clients and for new employees, that we’re not making the kind of work that really takes advantage of having all of [America’s attention].”
Yet Vaynerchuk added that while he thinks a Super Bowl ad is the greatest buy in the world, “literally the second most expensive commercial in the world is the worst.”
During his rant, he also discussed his penchant for trying out new platforms before they’ve been adopted at scale, telling the audience that the email newsletter he sent out for his wine business in 1996 had a 91.3% open rate. He explained that the high open rates were “not because I was a genius or the copy was so great, it was cause nobody was email marketing.”
When discussing creativity, Vaynerchuk called out brands that churn out “100% vanilla creative” in hopes of appealing to a mass audience, explaining that a 44-year-old woman with four kids living in Houston is going to react to a brand in a much different manner than a single 26-year-old living in Alaska.
“We have to really understand that our brands mean different things to different people,” he said. “We have to understand that there is a totally different marketplace.”