• “I’ve spent, you know, 15 years amassing tens of millions of followers. And yet somebody walking down the [Cannes] Croisette today, who’s never posted once, can make one video and that could get more views than I can get,” Vaynerchuk said.
  • “For the first time in the history of marketing, you can post something, not have any money paid to amplify it and have millions of people see it. That is profound.”

Social media algorithms have created a more meritocratic advertising landscape that the industry has been slow to adapt to, according to VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk.

“The social media I grew up with… it was more like email marketing,” Vaynerchuk told CNBC’s Tania Bryer at the Cannes Lions Festival.

Vaynerchuk, the co-founder of restaurant booking platform Resy and an early investor in X (formerly Twitter) explained, “Every brand that’s here, you would try to amass as many followers as you could, and then you would post, and a percentage of them would see it.”

“Now we live in a world of social media over the last two, three years, five years, where the AI algorithms that give you the For You page, the content is finding the audience,” he added.

“For You” is a TikTok feature that presents trending content based on users’ past usage.

Vaynerchuk noted, “I’ve spent, you know, 15 years amassing tens of millions of followers. And yet somebody walking down the [Cannes] Croisette today, who’s never posted once, can make one video and that could get more views than I can get.”

“I think that meritocracy around content is empowering… For the first time in the history of marketing, you can post something, not have any money paid to amplify it, and have millions of people see it. That is profound.”

Despite this shift, Vaynerchuk observed that the advertising industry remains focused on traditional formats like print ads and 30-second commercials.

“Brand is built in social and it’s time to actually respect the art and the craft and the ads within that medium. And the longer you wait and you don’t, the more likely startup brands are going to take your market share,” he said.