Gary Vaynerchuk is making a big bet on big brands.
In 2019, Vaynerchuk launched a small-business marketing agency called The Sasha Group. Today, he announced that it’s being rebranded as ChukMedia — and will now serve enterprise clients exclusively, just like his agency VaynerMedia does.
ChukMedia is already working with Subway, Utz, and DripDrop.
Why would Vaynerchuk build two enterprise-focused marketing agencies? It’s common within the creative world, where conglomerates like Omnicom and Publicis operate multiple agencies with different strategies. But moreso, Vaynerchuk says, he saw a unique opportunity — to serve a fundamental shift in how marketing works, and what large brands need to survive.
Big brands, he says, must move at the speed of culture. And they frequently don’t.
“The day of reckoning is here,” he says. “The people that are television commercial first, classic marketing, traditional first, or yesterday’s digital marketing first, are being upended by social-first agencies.”
The Speed Problem
Vaynerchuk’s diagnosis of big brand marketing is blunt: They’re too slow for today’s world.
He points to a pivotal moment from 2013, when the lights went out during the Super Bowl and Oreo quickly tweeted “You can still dunk in the dark.” (It was produced by creative agency 360i.) The tweet became the viral moment of that Super Bowl, back when brands were still learning how to play on social media. Within minutes of that tweet going live, Vaynerchuk sent a company-wide email with just one line: “Our company has changed forever.”
“We had been preaching for years about speed, volume, relevance at scale, social first,” he recalls. “Thirteen years later, I will tell you that that dream, that moment has been realized at scale.”
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