How to succeed in marketing: consumer centricity, creative accountability, and AI

Executive overview

The marketing industry is trapped in yesterday's frameworks — optimising for metrics no one sees, separating media from creative, and chasing data lakes while drifting further from the consumer. Budget is not the variable of success. Being consumer-centric is.

Gary Vaynerchuk argues for reuniting media and creative under one accountable roof, embracing the "and" mindset over "or", and treating social media creative with the same rigour applied to any major media buy.

The core insight: the industry has built elaborate systems to avoid accountability, and the brands paying the price are the ones that refuse to close that gap.

The attention gap marketers keep ignoring

• Credit for "seeing around corners" is misplaced — the real edge is acting on scale that already exists but hasn't been measured yet
• TikTok had hundreds of millions of users before big brands touched it; if it's not measured, it isn't actioned, even when consumer attention is clearly there
• The delta between where attention is and where spend follows is where competitive advantage lives
• Most big marketing budgets still over-index on traditional media; the arbitrage in biddable social and influencer remains underexploited

Reuniting media and creative

• Separating media and creative was a financial move by holding companies — it removed accountability and created two profit centers
• When an agency controls both, it can be held accountable to actual business results; when they're split, no one owns the outcome
• CMOs should pressure agencies to bring media and creative back under one roof
• VaynerMedia built its entire model around this: take both, be accountable to the result at year end
• The agency begs clients for this arrangement — vulnerability comes every time they don't have it

Retraining creative talent for accountability

• The biggest challenge in 14 years of running VaynerMedia: giving creatives more self-esteem tied to merit, not subjective opinion
• Senior creatives hired from top shops arrive saying they want accountability — they're stunned in their first meeting when it's real
• The breakthrough: every creative globally now makes actual creative every day, not decks and pitches
• Living in a merit-based environment — where social posts produce real, immediate data — forces adaptation
• Many quit; those who stay become believers; inbound from Wieden, Crispin, Droga is now strong
• Social creative is unforgiving: a bad post goes nowhere, a bad billboard gets rationalised away

"And" not "or"

• The most important word in marketing is "and" — the industry is obsessed with "or" and forces false choices
• If two platforms both have consumer attention, the answer is almost always to use both
• Creative is overpriced, which is the real reason "or" decisions get made — fix the cost structure and everything becomes "and"
• Portfolio brands asking which segment gets which product is a boardroom exercise with no consumer logic behind it

Post-iOS 14 and the creative variable

• Most large brands never lived in a cookie world anyway — no cookies on TV, outdoor, print, or events
• Post-iOS 14.5 collided with the TikTokification of every social platform: for the first time in marketing history, creative quality creates reach
• The best DTC and performance brands are winning by running aggressive organic social, identifying creative that overindexes, then converting it into paid ads — intent confirmed by reality
• Modern social creative can mitigate risk on both performance and brand campaigns; the industry's disrespect for it is leaving that advantage on the table

AI: where marketers should actually be

• Marketers not playing with AI weekly are repeating the mistake of not going on the internet in 1997
• This is a training-wheels phase — the right move is education and experimentation, not execution dollars on unproven use cases
• Generative creative has a near-term ceiling: copyright and trademark liability means large companies can't publish it yet, but internal use and deck-building are open
• The people who execute others' ideas in Adobe are at risk; the people who generate the ideas have more runway
• Everything that has bias was built by humans — AI bias is an infrastructure and education problem, not a uniquely AI one

The Barbie campaign and what it proved

• The campaign earned rare praise: 360 execution across digital and experiential was genuinely well done
• Experiential used as a content studio is an underused model — one investment can yield both the event and the creative output
• The area with most marginal upside: thumbnail science, post timing, and the quantitative layer around social creative structure — the industry underinvests here across the board

Twitter/X rebrand logic

• Intuitive reaction is that abandoning brand equity is a huge give-up
• The strategic logic: rebranding creates a blank slate for positioning as a full-stack multi-dimensional app, avoiding consumer anchoring to a single use case
• Names are executed — Google and McDonald's are proof that execution makes the name, not the other way around
• The rebrand's verdict will be written by execution over the next five years

Streaming, AVOD, and the persistent creative problem

• Targeting capabilities in streaming AVOD are genuinely exciting — much closer to the Google/Facebook ecosystem than linear TV
• The risk: the industry will replicate linear TV's mistake of leading with disruptive ad units instead of integrated product placement
• YouTube remains materially underinvested by most brands relative to the attention it commands
• The Super Bowl is the most underpriced media globally — 170 million Americans actively wanting to watch 30 seconds justifies the $8M buy; the waste is in using that slot for agency showcase work or celebrity-building rather than brand-building
• Creative is still the variable of success; everything else is infrastructure around the ad

Breaking artists and the human-as-brand shift

• The music industry A&R function has moved to social platforms — emerging artists are visible before anyone needs to find them in bars
• Signing on music quality alone is too risky; artists who are also native content creators carry their own distribution
• Lil Nas X is a growth hacker in the mould of Mr. Beast, not a traditional artist — this is the blueprint
• The competitors of consumer brands going forward are human beings with large audiences; Logan Paul and KSI building Prime is the model
• Budget will not overcome this — the cost of entry to social is equal, corporations are slow, and it is a merit game