'The Magic Is in the Purple': Gary Vaynerchuk's Ethos and Industry Assessment

The last time Vaynerchuk was able to visit his team in London was before the pandemic. Since then, the business has left its more central offices and recently moved into a shared space full of creative startups in the south of the city, near Elephant and Castle, which it is quickly taking over. Led by managing director Sarah Baumann, the London team of 120 people is easily the largest in the building, and when this reporter arrives, Vaynerchuk is holding court with as many people as can fit into one of the meeting rooms. He explains that he wants to spend as much time with them as possible after all this time. The VaynerMedia ethos It’s been over five years since the London shop opened its doors as the agency's first team outside of the U.S., hiring Baumann to lead it in 2019 from Leo Burnett, where she was its London deputy chief executive. After all the uncertainty of the last two years, agency groups with an international presence and their clients are now under scrutiny for their response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Vaynerchuk believes agencies and brands should weigh whether taking a stand is worth it, citing the division within U.S. politics of red and blue. “All the magic is in the purple,” he says. “And what we, as agencies, are spending a lot of time on is being purple." VaynerMedia's digital-first positioning is at odds with other agency groups, which Vaynerchuk describes as being “tone deaf” and trying to operate in a “creative nirvana that has no pulse on reality.” He further highlights that difference when he warns that agencies should not “blindly follow” what their clients want them to do. He operates in the middle ground, seeking “a balance” while going in his own direction. VaynerMedia, Adweek’s 2022 Breakthrough Agency of the Year, is growing internationally, including around 300 employees now in the Asia-Pacific region and 50 in Latin America. Vaynerchuk is aware that each market has its own “little nuances” and must be approached individually. We believe one of the biggest elephants in the room is that people are buying media on GRPs and impressions and that they're not actually getting consumed.Gary Vaynerchuk As the leader of a growing international business, Vaynerchuk wants everything to be “incredibly nuanced and on the pulse,” with different strategies working across different international regions. He encourages his leadership team to not “lead with fear,” thereby allowing the business to give its best advice in an “empathetic way.” That is not something he believes other agencies, which he sees as either “too passive” or “too audacious,” do. Vaynerchuk believes the shift to social media is as meaningful as when audiences migrated from radio to television. “The brand is built in social,” he said, and expects the success of that focus will be his legacy. Social, he said, is where consumer insights are held, and those insights have reached a clarity unseen previously. VaynerMedia also follows a strategic organic content (SOC) strategy and avoids the “spray and pray” social content distribution model to focus on creative relevance. 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 “We want to have a much bigger conversation with clients around actual consumption versus potential reach," Vaynerchuk said. "We believe one of the biggest elephants in the room is that people are buying media on GRPs and impressions, and that they're not actually getting consumed, but the reports indicate that they are. "If you make the decision that is true, then it changes the entire conversation. All of a sudden, you are not doing cliché television with matching luggage and programmatic digital. You’re doing more of what we do, which is looking at the consumer segmentations that you are trying to communicate to and figure out what social platforms we should communicate those objectives on … and let’s make strategic creative at scale.” Stuck in the past Vaynerchuk sees the advertising industry as stuck in the past due to short-term thinking and fear of shareholders. To him, there are only three independent agencies of scale in the world: W+K, VaynerMedia and Mother. He also feels that the growth in interest in working with consultancies such as Accenture Interactive has come because they are “better run businesses” with “better leadership” than the agency networks. “If I was the CEO of Publicis or Omnicom, I would have to be held accountable to shareholder value," he said. "There's a lot more money to be made in bullshit digital and television than in what we do. So I understand. "What I know is that the taxi cab industry, with all their political clout, eventually lost to Uber. What I know is that the TV networks, for all their power, eventually lost to Netflix and Amazon. What I know is that even though all the agencies back in the day wanted to write radio copy, those long-forgotten jobs were transitioned to television copywriting, and they lost to Don Draper. And so, you just know what's going to happen. We just have to rely on patience.” For Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year VaynerMedia, Convergence Fuels Success