The GaryVee Audio Experience

Episode Summary: 2025 Marketing Strategy That Will Revolutionize Your Ads

Host: Gary Vaynerchuk
Date: September 19, 2025

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode centers on how marketing strategy must adapt for 2025 and beyond, emphasizing the centrality of creativity and the transformative power of social and organic media. Gary Vaynerchuk challenges legacy brand practices, critiques the overvaluation of traditional campaign-centric marketing, and shares actionable insights on leveraging modern platforms, consumer attention, and leadership with kindness. If you work in marketing, CPG, or leadership, this episode delivers a bold vision for the future.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Brand Building Principles: Then vs. Now

• Legacy Assumptions Are Vulnerable:
  Traditional branding principles from the 1990s are no longer sufficient because distribution and consumer behavior have fundamentally shifted ([01:10]).

  “Us wanting everything to be matching luggage and on brand based on our subjective opinions has made us incredibly not relevant.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [01:24]

• Return to Common Sense:
  Marketing has grown overly complex and reliant on expensive measurement and reporting, fragmenting decision-making and diminishing effectiveness. Gary advocates bringing media and creative under one roof, echoing earlier industry structures ([02:50]).

  “The biggest elephant in the room is we’ve put common sense way back and we need to bring common sense back into companies.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [03:28]

2. The Core Variable: Creative Execution

• Creative is the Deciding Factor:
  Regardless of targeting or data, creative is what actually converts consumers. Even with perfect data, without compelling creative, marketing fails ([05:17]).

  “The creative is the variable of this entire conversation. Even if you could target everybody everywhere... it still doesn’t mean I’m going to convert you.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [05:30]

• AI & Algorithms Have Remade Distribution:
  Social platforms’ algorithms now match creative to consumers proactively—thus, “creative finds you” rather than you seeking creative. Testing creative in native social environments is essential because that’s where actual attention lives ([07:30]).

  “All of creative testing in all of Fortune 500 marketing should be happening in native social media creative ads. Those analytics and that data and that AI is disproportionately the most powerful.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [08:18]

3. Outflanked by Start-Ups: Why Big Brands Are Losing

• Startups Leverage Social Better:
  Large corporations are being outmaneuvered by startups who fully exploit consumer-centric and social-first marketing, often with radically smaller budgets ([09:45]).

  “Brands in this portfolio are getting outflanked by startup brands with a couple of million dollars of VC funding because they are winning in consumer-centric environments.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [10:03]

• Corporate Inertia and Outdated Mindsets:
  Internal KPIs, bonus structures, and adherence to legacy practices keep big brands from pivoting quickly even when they recognize what’s happening ([11:30], [12:10]).

  “We are operating not on what we most believe our money is spent on to drive sales. We’re doing what is accepted within the organization.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [11:16]

4. Rethinking Brand Guidelines and Boardroom Debates

• Over-Engineering for Social:
  Old-school brand guidelines and creative review processes (e.g., debating fonts for social posts as if they’re Super Bowl ads) are wasteful and don’t harness social’s native strengths ([12:27]).

  “Are you really interested in sitting and debating for 31 minutes about a color or a font on an individual social media post like it's a Super Bowl ad? But we do it all day long.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [12:28]

• Letting Data Guide You:
  Brands should publish both their “on brand” creative and what their agency partners recommend, then let native platform analytics decide what works ([13:30]).

• Brand Positioning is Overrated vs. Relevance:
  Theoretical distinctions in brand positioning are less important; what matters is who finds an ad relevant enough to act ([15:15]).

  “No human on earth that buys our stuff thinks about brand positioning. They think about relevance.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [15:49]

5. Social as the Crucible for Creative Experimentation

• Continuous Testing vs. High-Stakes Bets:
  Gary champions a “day trading attention” model—small, frequent tests in social that outperform the old model of banking on a big, once-a-year idea ([17:30]).

  “Being able to mitigate the risk of the creative I put in Super Bowl by doing marketing all year is exciting for me versus what… everyone does, which is they start with a brief, an agency comes up with an idea, and then you bet the farm on it at Super Bowl, and then you do matching luggage the rest of the year. We have it backwards.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [19:45]

6. Leadership Philosophy: Kindness Over Fear

• Short-Term vs. Long-Term Motivation:
  Weaponized fear gets short-term results but kills long-term performance. Love, optimism, and kindness unlock the most from teams ([20:59]).

  “I don’t think leaders that sell on fear realize they’re just getting 7 out of 10 from people. The only way to get 11 out of 10 is love, period.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [22:28]

• Cultural Incentives Must Match Words:
  For behavioral change, KPIs, bonuses, and reporting must align with professed values (like kindness or social focus), or change will not happen ([32:59]).

  “If 50% of their bonus was based on them allocating 50% of their creative fees to social, I have a funny feeling every brand would allocate 50% of their fees.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [34:36]

7. The Viral Video Myth and Reality

• Going Viral: Not Guaranteed, But More Possible:
  Agencies can’t promise viral videos, but increasing creative volume and at-bats raises the odds, especially as platform mechanics change ([28:37]).

  “The ability for a video to go viral as we sit in this conference room right now is dramatically higher than it’s ever been in the history of marketing.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [28:40]

• Case Studies:
  Gary retells examples of viral content driving real sellouts (Mango Gummy at Walgreens, Ocean Spray TikTok), underscoring that no TV ad has done that in decades ([30:00]).

8. Closing Thoughts: The Social Disruption Every CPG Needs to Face

• Disruptors Are Coming for Every Category:
  Influencers and content creators are now launching brands across all CPG spaces, leveraging their native digital reach to outperform established giants ([36:42]).

  “Fortune 500 companies are getting outflanked by Fortune 10,000 companies. They have no money and they’re beating us up... In the CPG category, every brand is next.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [36:46]

• Mitigating Creative Risk on Social:
  Social media offers fast and inexpensive feedback, yet big brands frequently undervalue and underfund it.

  “Mitigating creative risk is the number one task at hand. Social media is sitting there willing to help you do it for free. But your disrespect and misunderstanding of it is putting you in a secondary spot.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [38:10]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We continue to debate in the boardroom as if the Internet doesn’t exist, as if these social networks don’t have unlimited analytics.” ([13:20])

• “The only way to build demand is relevance at scale.” ([16:48])

• “The algorithm is exposing who you are, not forcing you to be someone. And that’s a great misunderstanding.” ([22:05])

• “Change the bonus structure and you change the organization.” ([35:04])

Important Segment Timestamps

• [01:10] — How old branding principles are now vulnerable
• [05:17] — Creative as foundational in modern marketing
• [08:18] — Creative testing must be embedded in social
• [12:27] — Wastefulness of legacy creative review for social
• [15:49] — Brand positioning vs. real-world consumer relevance
• [19:45] — Why “day trading attention” outpaces yearly campaigns
• [22:28] — Love vs. fear in leadership
• [28:40] — Making viral video is now possible with scale
• [30:00] — Real-life viral examples crushing traditional ads
• [34:36] — Aligning incentive structures for real change
• [36:46] — How disruptors are steamrolling established CPG giants
• [38:10] — Social as risk-mitigation for creative

Tone & Style

Gary brings his signature energy—direct, empathic, and optimistic—while combining hard truths with actionable advice. His approach mixes challenging industry norms, storytelling from his own career, and a call to arms for leaders to reexamine not just marketing tactics, but incentive structures, culture, and leadership itself.

For Listeners Who Missed It

If you’re trying to future-proof your brand, maximize reach, or evolve as a leader, this episode is a must. Gary Vee delivers a roadmap for the next era of marketing and organizational change—one that demands speed, relevance, creative courage, and a social-first mindset. His advice: reallocate resources, challenge legacy rituals, and, above all, out-execute through relevance, experimentation, and data-driven creative.

Contact Gary: Connect via LinkedIn (he welcomes outreach)
Book Mentioned: Day Trading Attention (NYT Best Seller)