How You Build a Brand That Actually Wins in 2025 | Adweek Leadership Voices

The GaryVee Audio Experience

Gary Vaynerchuk

Business, Marketing, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 18.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this raw, unfiltered deep-dive with AdAge, I break down what makes VaynerMedia and VaynerX different — and why kindness, culture, and conviction are more powerful than any viral TV spot.

Whether you’re building a business, a brand, or a life — this one’s for you. 💥

We talk about:

Why “TV-first” thinking is killing creativity 🧠
How I built VaynerX like a startup, not a holding company
My real take on AI, influencers & the future of marketing
The secret behind our Honey Empire culture 🍯
Why BeFriends is my most personal, creative project ever
The myth of trends — and why they actually matter
What kind of clients we actually want to work with (yes, I said it)
How my lemonade stand taught me everything I needed to know

If you care about brand building, leadership, or marketing in the year we actually live in — this episode will hit hard.

Listen now and tell a friend who needs to hear it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Gary Vaynerchuk. I am the CEO and chairman of VaynerX and VaynerMedia and the creator and CEO of VFriends, which means everything that's wrong is my fault.
0:12.6	Amazing. And how is VaynerMedia unique?
0:15.9	VaynerMedia, especially in the landscape of our industry, is one independent and at scale, which is a rarity.
0:26.2	Two, has media and creative under one roof.
0:31.2	So not in a holding company environment where there are separate companies and you create a team for a client.
0:36.2	Like VaynerMedia has hundreds and hundreds of employees both in media and creative and they work together every day.
0:42.3	So we're dramatically more integrated.
0:44.3	VaynerMedia is unique in that we are one of the stronger creative agencies in the world.
0:50.3	Yet most of our industry doesn't think that, meaning we think in television commercial land in this industry.
0:59.3	So even though VaynerMedia has done many, I think, 16 Super Bowl spots now in the last four or five or six years,
1:07.2	we are often thought of as a social creative shop to many people on the other side of this
1:13.9	camera, which is exactly how we want it because we think social creative is actually the
1:19.4	new creative AOR and that's where brand is actually built.
1:23.1	And so I don't think anybody as committed or as talented at the creative product in social, so
1:29.5	I think we're unique there.
1:31.6	We're unique that we're still founder-led, even though we're thousands of employees globally.
1:37.0	And so, and I'm a character.
1:39.0	So that creates a unique thing.
1:41.2	I think I'm incredibly well-parented, and my mother's my hero, so I think we're unique in
1:46.6	that people don't cry at VaynerMedia the way they cry at most agencies. So I think we have a
1:51.9	better culture. I think we're unique. Those are some things. Can you tell us about Vayner-X and
1:59.3	what makes it unique? VaynererX is pretty unique too.
	...

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