Gary Vaynerchuk doubled his agency’s revenue in 5 years. AI could make that growth more difficult in the future.

Gary Vaynerchuk speaks during his entrepreneurship festival, VeeCon 2024.

Serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk built an advertising empire over the past 15 years by helping companies like PepsiCo and Mondelez jump on social media trends.

Now, his holding company, VaynerX, is on track to top $300 million in revenue this year, he told B-17. He said it also continues to be profitable. Most significantly: Its revenue has more than doubled in the past five years, Vaynerchuk said — a feat that way outpaces the ad industry overall.

Vaynerchuk, a colorful persona in an industry where legends David Ogilvy or Leo Burnett are largely a thing of the past, made a name for himself by identifying and jumping on the next big thing in consumer attention.

VaynerX has grown by adding other disciplines beyond social media marketing, including units focused on buying retail media and TV advertising and one focused on advising direct-to-consumer startups. It also benefits from Vaynerchuk’s massive social following — including 15 million on TikTok alone — and his personal network.

Consulting is one of VaynerX’s fastest-growing areas. The company started offering consulting in 2022, helping marketers with things like social media strategy and corporate communications. Consulting now represents 10% of revenue.

International expansion to areas like Asia-Pacific and Latin America is another growth area. VaynerX now employs nearly 2,000 employees from New York to Singapore, up from about 800 people in 2019 — and international work accounts for 20% of revenue. (As a private company, VaynerX doesn’t release financial data, so B-17 couldn’t independently verify its figures.)

Vaynerchuk said he sees the company’s revenue doubling again in the next five years.

Still, the ad industry is staring down major potential disruption as generative AI threatens to automate some of the work agencies do, and many in the industry are wondering what Vaynerchuk’s next big act will be. CMOs no longer have to be convinced to embrace social media, and many have bypassed agencies like VaynerX altogether to take that work in-house. Firms like VaynerX have had to diversify.

“The creative agencies are shrinking — holding companies downsize every year,” said Michael Farmer, a consultant to ad agencies and marketers. “It’s not a healthy business. Nobody knows what works.”

Vaynerchuk still evangelizes to CMOs about the importance of social media marketing. But his passions have expanded to include Meta’s Ray-Bans (Vaynerchuk is an investor in Meta), which he thinks could replace the mobile phone. He’s big on live social shopping, which he predicts will blow up next year.

He’s also styled himself as something of an AI guru. Vaynerchuk’s stance is that business leaders should find a middle ground when it comes to the new technology.

“Don’t demonize it, like, ‘We’ll never do AI; that’s bad for humanity,'” he said. “Or the other way: ‘Oh great, we don’t need to do anything else; AI will take care of it.’ So, let’s not get too high on it. Let’s not get too low on it.”

Vaynerchuk urges clients to see AI’s potential beyond just cost savings. “We talk about it from internal and external efficiencies of course, but clients are starting to understand the big game, which is, ‘How do you earn views in social?'” he said. “And they’re agnostic, whether that’s an AI piece of creative or a human piece of creative. They just want to get the awareness and the consideration and the relevancy.”

Social marketing is still central to the company’s identity. One of Vaynerchuk’s coups in 2023 was helping PepsiCo jump-start sales for Mug Root Beer by suggesting new uses for the 80-plus-year-old brand, like using it to make ramen and Boba tea.

Greg Lyons, CMO of PepsiCo’s North American beverage business, said rather than going the traditional marketing route of spending a lot of money and time to come up with a single message, VaynerX’s media agency, VaynerMedia, created a lot of social media posts and waited to see which ones took off before deciding which message to put dollars behind.

“The thing I love most about Vayner is that they’re social-first, which means they understand what happens in culture very quickly,” Lyons said. “They’ve shot Super Bowl ads in the past for us. But they’re at their best when they’re leaning into their core — they’re best in the world at being social-first.”