VaynerMedia: 2022 Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year

When he founded VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk didn’t even know media and creative agencies had split apart decades earlier. So it didn’t occur to him to have separate creative and media agencies inside his fledgling holding company, VaynerX. Becoming a full-service agency was always the plan. Legacy holding companies, on the other hand, are now trying to mash their separate agency brands back together. Campaign data, modern leaders have figured out, can lend strategy to creativity. But getting remarried can be messy when it disrupts the status quo and long-established practices like creatives leading the creative. VaynerMedia entered the creative space over a decade ago. It rose to prominence alongside Vaynerchuk, whose approachable social media presence turned out to be rocket fuel for VaynerX and its subsidiaries. Despite its name, VaynerMedia started out as a social agency, but it ultimately grew into a full-service shop. Today, it produces ads with national scale, including three Super Bowl ads this year: Budweiser's “A Clydesdale's Journey,” DraftKings' "Fortune: Life’s a Gamble” and Planters' regional spot, "Feed the Debate." Vaynerchuk’s flair carries over to the agency’s media side—though it isn't really a "side." Media and creative and strategy and consulting sit together, working as a single team. And as holding companies stitch together creative and media through mergers and acquisitions, the blending of the two comes naturally to VaynerMedia. “I knew so little about Madison Avenue," says Vaynerchuk. "It didn't even cross my mind that one could be successful in business—aka using marketing to make your business work—with the concept of having creative and media as separate entities.” Though the agency is known among marketers for its creative work, VaynerMedia’s business finally reflects its name. Named Adweek's 2022 Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year, the agency has been scooping up its creative clients’ media businesses and nabbing AOR duties for high-profile media accounts. After initially using the agency for creative services, ScottsMiracle-Gro, for instance, named VaynerMedia its media AOR last year. Other high-profile media AOR wins include Tinder and American Eagle. Now, the media business is on fire, with managed media spend up 65% year over year. In fact, it's now growing on par with the creative business for VaynerMedia. An integrated media agency is born Growth accelerated for VaynerMedia when John “JT” Terrana joined the agency to lead its media practice after the agency hired its global chief creative officer, Rob Lenois. Vaynerchuk trusts Terrana to guide the media business strategically. “You had all the discipline leads coming in as net new folks, and the charter from Gary was, ‘We're going to build the most integrated thing you've ever seen,'” Terrana says. Now, he says, about 60% of the agency's media clients engage with its strategy or creative teams in some fashion. The media team grew from 120 members two years ago to 350 today, tripling its managed media spend in the process. The agency is on a path to manage nearly $1 billion in media spend in 2022, Terrana tells Adweek. Vaynerchuk views the timing of all the recent success as serendipitous. The agency’s integrated model turned out to be a good fit for marketers who wanted to see media and creative reunited. “The industry is starting to understand that these two disciplines need to be together to drive actual results," Vaynerchuk says, "especially with how the internet's built. And so, we've got a real head start with that being our DNA." Key campaigns: Bose In an effort to drive its DTC sales, Bose partnered with VaynerMedia last summer to build a DTC engine that could fuel success over the 2021 holidays. In Q4, using the Vayner Volume Model, the agency tested content with dozens of cohorts, unlocking new fan segments including football fans, music lovers, productivity masters, college students and holiday gift-givers. VaynerMedia created more than 160 pieces of social content with thousands of permutations. As a result, across all Q4 activity, VaynerMedia campaigns drove orders on Bose.com up 213% more than the campaign target. Tinder Tinder needed to entice Gen Z women in order to drive growth, but that demo had preconceived notions of the platform as a “hookup app.” To alter Tinder’s perception and drive downloads, it homed in on TikTok, Snapchat and Twitter and VaynerMedia developed 30 unique audience cohorts. Between influencer partners and optimizing content for its various segments, the campaign cut Tinder’s cost per install by 67% and cost per registration and reactivation by 54%. ScottsMiracle-Gro Riding a pandemic business boom, ScottsMiracle-Gro saw double-digit growth for the first time, attracting 21 million new households into the lawn and garden category. Its nimble marketing approach contributed to its success, and the company built a system to optimize its marketing strategy based on point-of-sale data from Home Depot, Lowe’s and other retailers. The process involved analyzing weekend POS data on Monday, briefing new creative and media strategies on Tuesday, developing strategies on Wednesday and Thursday, and launching new content and campaigns on Thursday evenings to run through Sunday. ScottsMiracle-Gro used Vayner for creative, but last year, it elevated it to media AOR. The 'media pirates' In 2017, Jon Halvorson, global svp of consumer experience at Mondelēz International, sat down with Vaynerchuk to talk shop. “I left exhausted and invigorated all at the same time,” Halvorson says, adding that he walked away from the conversation determined to accelerate the company's North American review. Halvorson wouldn’t regret his decision after the agency lifted Mondelēz's marketing ROI from average in 2017 to the top quartile in the food and beverage category globally and in the U.S., according to the company’s Nielsen metrics, though the brand declined to provide precise numbers. “This is a story of pirates,” says Halvorson, referring to the agency's company culture and its ability to find "hacks in the system" that drive ROI. Halvorson was a client reference for VaynerMedia when it pitched P&G and American Eagle, and rather than waiting for a reference check call, he proactively reached out to the brands' marketing leaders to vouch for the media agency. VaynerMedia took on digital, and later, Spark Foundry—Adweek’s 2022 U.S. Media Agency of the Year—handled television buying for Mondelēz. The two agencies worked together so seamlessly, Halvorson says, that some members of his team weren’t sure which employees worked at which agencies when they completed agency evaluations at the end of the year. The agencies’ working relationship is so strong, in fact, that Spark licenses its technology tool to VaynerMedia so the two can stay integrated. “I can't even imagine another two agencies coming to that without me having to get involved,” Halvorson says. Media school for nascent talent If VaynerMedia employees impress Halvorson with their deep knowledge of the media practice, it's because the agency makes sure so many of them actually execute on client work. Stacking the ratio of practitioners to leaders is a strategic move on the part of the agency, which has more than 200 media practitioners at the managerial level or below who are well trained on media buying and planning. That ensures the bulk of the agency's employees understand how complex digital platforms and processes work. More than 100 VaynerMedia employees teach a three-month training program for new hires called the Vayner Residency Program. VaynerMedia embeds its "residents" into client teams while they learn their role by completing coursework each week. (Residents spend about 25% of their time in class and the rest embedded in a client team.) For entry-level marketers, the program is a prerequisite for long-term employment at the agency. All entry-level U.S. employees complete the program before they receive full-time offers. Last summer, the agency hired 66 of them—its largest class ever—and integrated strategy and creative residents with media residents. VaynerMedia residents (Back row, l. to r.) Betty Wang, Wendy Chen, Jessica Saad, CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, Jamie Li, Jessy Ayala, Victoria Chavez (Front row, l. to r.) Wil Rampersaud, Abdul Bishar, Gina Marcisak, Nasrin Younus, Angelina Yang, Mark DiIonno, Andrew Leach “No, you can't specialize in just buying. We truly want to train you across the board and cross-functionally,” says Sarah Murphy, VaynerMedia’s evp, head of capabilities. It's crucial that today’s early-career marketers obtain that hard-to-find education, and since the agency streamlines learning on the job, a college degree is optional for VaynerMedia employees. If you ask Terrana, college doesn’t always teach students the skills needed to succeed in today’s digital advertising world. David Ogilvy’s book, On Advertising—though esteemed in the industry—doesn’t reflect today’s advertising landscape, Terrana says, meaning it doesn’t teach readers how to plan an omnichannel campaign across platforms. “We've taken classic creative folks and introduced them to media folks," Terrana says. "Then we’ve taken big media folks and introduced creative and strategy to them. And the sweet spot of that is what we call the Volume Model." The Vayner Volume Model The Vayner Volume Model is essentially A/B testing at tremendous scale and is the secret to VaynerMedia's success in delivering results across platforms. The process involves testing between 30 and 100 pieces of creative against 12 to 15 audience cohorts. The agency invests micro amounts of media spend and gleans "a shitload of insights," Terrana says. Teams across disciplines meet upward of three times a week to discuss those insights. Analytics and media explain what’s working from a quantitative perspective. The strategy team analyzes the qualitative elements, such as what the comments on a TikTok post reveal about audience sentiment. Then the teams present their findings to the creative team, which uses the insights to guide content development. This process is a far cry from how agencies are used to working. Creative agencies are typically tapped to lead idea development. Usually, media agencies come in later in the process. This sometimes results in a disjointed viewing experience for consumers who expect the ads they see on TikTok to be different from the ads they see on Instagram, for example. When Jim Mollica assumed the role of CMO at Bose last year, VaynerMedia impressed him so much that he decided to carry two media agencies simultaneously, dipping into a discretionary budget to hire the agency before his contract with WPP expired. “That's how confident I was in what they were going to do,” Mollica says. We started off with some smaller pilots, and they won the entire business within the year.” The Volume Model is central to Bose’s success, pushing the legacy brand into newer social platforms like TikTok. The test results were revelatory for the audio brand. After consumers responded positively to the tongue-in-cheek messaging, the brand felt confident enough to initiate partnerships it hadn’t considered before. “Gary gave me a call and said, ‘Hey, I got this idea.’ And we started signing some of these athletes to take advantage of the moment and building content around it that Bose never would have done ever before,” Mollica says. Key wins: Tinder, American Eagle, Bose, DraftKings, Express, Kin Insurance, ScottsMiracle-Gro and Mondelēz (expanded partnership). Losses: Panera, WeWork U.S. Strategic moves: Grew its managed media spend by 65% and increased head count by nearly 75% globally; hired Burger King vet Hailey Riggle as svp of media and Hulu vet Taylor Wiens as vp of media to support Mint Mobile and Lyft; hired JeanCarlo Bonilla as its first chief analytics officer; expanded its residency program, bringing on more than 100 residents in 2021; created a new role, post-creative strategist, to work alongside creators and media analysts; broke into linear TV and hired Hugh Scallon to oversee the expansion; widened its focus on emerging trends including retail media, the metaverse and NFTs. Global revenue: $188 million, a 31% increase from 2020. Media revenue growth of 65% year over year. (Source: VaynerMedia) An anti-holding company Vaynerchuk and his team have “eaten a lot of crow for the last seven years” over the agency's approach, the founder says. But now that VaynerMedia is successful, he wants to keep growing. However, unlike many industry executives, he wants to do it organically—not by acquisition. “I think I'm very good at what I do for a living," Vaynerchuk says. "It would be very hard if I bought a holding company tomorrow. There's so many misaligned aspects. I'm never going to do that. It’s not going to work.” Vaynerchuk says he won’t be folding other brands into VaynerMedia, either—a bold statement in an industry rife with consolidation. Instead, he plans to scale the agency himself and avoid some of the inherent cultural challenges associated with mergers, such as tension over leadership appointments. “What I've learned about this industry, 13 years in, is they will hold onto the past to the bitter end," he says. "It will be 12:01 before they let go. But the problem is the consumer and technology don't care about what we all want. It's just going to continue to evolve.”

Media Agency of the Year

For Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year VaynerMedia, Convergence Fuels Success

Reuniting media and creative is one thing the agency doesn’t need to worry about

Olivia Morley

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Olivia Morley