- This notion that quality is given up when you do a quantity of
creative is a huge misnomer and something that I think would
really benefit the industry and most of all the brands. (upbeat music) You've got your perspective. (audience cheering) I just wanna be happy. Don't you wanna be happy? - So tell me. - Yes. - I've just had a very quick
briefing here from Harriet, but I gather you've got a little bit of a different take on the market. - A little bit of a different take, yes. I think, you know, we started
the company 10 years ago. I, as an individual through my content and things of that nature,
have been quite loud. But as an agency, we've
been incredibly quiet. Hence why I think we're kinda
ready to get a little louder. Hence why we made the
amazing addition of Harriet. - Was that a, um-- - Super deliberate. - Super deliberate being quiet? - Yes. - What was the rational behind that? - I think when you're disrupting, you know, the longer
people underestimate you or don't even know you
exist, tends to have value. I also was coming from the outside. I was coming from Silicon Valley investing and wine ecommerce,
- Really? - So I came from a very
different background, I, yes-- - Wine ecommerce? - In 1996, I launched one of the first ecommerce
wine businesses in America. So that was my first career, being a marketer for my
family's liquor business and launching this big
ecommerce business was really how I learned my craft of media and creative and things of that nature. And so-- - What made you decide to leave wine? I mean, personally I'd
have stuck with the wine. (both laugh) You know, what made-- - It was a family business--
- Okay. - And my, you know, I got
into my early and mid 30s I'd invested in Facebook
and Twitter and Tumblr, which obviously changed
the course of my career. The world, the world opened
up for me a little bit and I started realizing
that I was a marketer. That I was a marketer that happened to grow out a wine business. I was a marketer that
happened to understand how to invest in apps 'cause I thought they would be the platforms
that people would market on. So, there was a little
bit of a self-awareness, self-revelation kind of going on for me. And then I also knew that
I didn't know anything about the biggest companies in the world. That I had done the small business thing, that I had done the Silicon Valley thing, but I had never really understood what Coca-Cola or Budweiser
or BMW was thinking and, more importantly,
watching from the outside I was curious to why they were
doing what they were doing. So I decided to start the
agency for two reasons. One, I wanted to learn that world and two, I wanted to
buy brands eventually. - Wow! - So my big ambition
to be in this industry is to buy nostalgic brands
from CBG Holding companies. - Okay. Wow! - Yeah, so a little bit
of a different angle. - Yeah! (laughs) - And so that all
manifests, as you can tell, in the form of creating
a very different shop. First of all, the first 30-40 employees at VaynerMedia back in 2009 to 2011 had zero days
of agency experience. So that was interesting. Number two, I built an agency that did creative and
media all under one house. Which now seems to be a conversation, but was very foreign in 2009
when I started VaynerMedia. - Okay. How many people do you
got at your agency now? - Eight? - (Harriet) Eight, just over 800. - Okay, wow! Big, I thought you were
going to say 40 or something. - You know, this is back
to kinda the strategy, you know, by being so quiet, you know, we've been able to sneak
up on our size, our scale. You know we have an office in London. We're opening up
Singapore this summer so-- - 800 people! - Yes! (laughs) - Wow, I'm absolutely blown away by that, that's a big agency. - Yeah, it's the biggest,
you know it's funny. I think when you walk around here and, Harriet maybe you can add some
context, it's interesting. You have a small group of people
who are either our clients, which we have many of, or
people that have worked with us, or people that have followed me on social that have a bigger inclining and probably think we're
the next big thing. And then you have an
enormous amount of people walking around here that
still have never heard of us. And it's kind of fun to be an enigma. - Yeah, I can see that! - But it's also fun to now
be at a maturity level where, when you're not only 800
people, when you're not only, you know, 150 million
dollar revenue business, and you're an independent, I mean, I don't know the stats on Wieden+Kennedy, but we have to be the
largest independent agency in this industry besides Wieden and yet, by not over emphasizing on press and awards in our first decade, it hasn't allowed the industry
to get to know us just yet. Which will be fun to,
you know, be involved in the industry a little bit
more in this next decade. - Yeah, sorry you did
mention a couple stats there, could you run those past me again? You said you um-- - Our revenues are gonna
be 150 million this year. Our head count you just heard. You know, we work with
Pepsi and Kraft and Chase. Yes, Harriet? (muffled speaking) I think you're right, it's funny. As such a showman, it's funny
that I'm more conservative on the numbers I throw out than higher. - What was it? - (Harriet) I think we track it to be a bit more than 150 million. - Plus, I'll put. (laughs) You'd said you reckoned your ambition was to buy nostalgic brands,
have you fulfilled that or are you still heading towards it? Is that your goal still? - That's my goal, the only
thing I was probably very wrong about when I started the
company 10 years ago was that the the world would melt
financially five years ago, five years later, that was my big thesis. Let me learn the industry,
and then let me buy a brand and convert my talent into the brand. - So you reckon that we were
gonna have a double dip. - I did, I though '09 with
the bailout was a bad decision and was putting a band aid and my intuition was that
the world was gonna melt. My main thesis to start the industry was Facebook, Amazon, and
Netflix were gonna win and the world was gonna melt. And I was right about
three of the four things. And the fourth one has led
to a very different path. I originally thought my
agency would be converted into a brand. Now, it's too big of a company
and we enjoy it too much that when I do buy a brand eventually in three, five, seven, nine years, then, then we're gonna still
keep the agency obviously. And we're gonna take some
of the agency people over to work on the businesses,
but I just don't know when that will be and honestly I'm so worried about building the agency
that I'm not overly, I can't control that anyway so I have to, I have to be prepared, but
I don't spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out when. - This is fascinating stuff. - Yes, it's definitely different. - Yeah, I'm really interested,
definitely interesting. - I also, I also think
it's double interesting, and let me tell you why. I'm not sure, but one of my
things that I'm very passionate about is to inspire a bigger push towards independent agencies
doing different things. I think it would be
healthy for the business, I think the holding companies
are smart enough to know what they need to worry
about is the consultancies. Right, they're gonna worry
about Accenture and others. But I do think for the
health of the industry, having more significant independent shops I think would really matter. - Well, you see that in television. I mean the great, most of the
great kind of creative ideas on television and drama
and things are come, certainly in the UK, coming
out of the Indie community. - They have more freedom.
- Yeah, you have more freedom! - You know, I mean let's
call it what it is. There's a very financially
heavy infrastructure to this creative field, I mean--
- Yeah, yeah that's right too. - Most, you know, when you
look at all the creative shops that have worked down there at the end, if you follow all the
lines, they're run by a CFO. - Yeah. - They're not run by a CCO. - Yeah, that's true. - That is true. And I think it's something
that's worth having more of a conversation about. - Yeah. So what would you like me to
focus on within my 300 words? - That, that we need a more
progressive conversation on volume of creative, that the industry needs to
start not demonizing quantity. - Okay. - This notion that quality is given up when you do a quantity of
creative is a huge misnomer and something that I think would
really benefit the industry and most of all the brands. - And how and what way would it benefit? - Most brands can't make relevant creative because they're not making enough creative to hit the many different cohorts they need to be talking to. And so they end up making
one vanilla piece of video. - I know, I kinda see what you mean. Don't speak 'cause I want to just get this down--
- You got it. - In your great words. I'm sorry, "They're not
making enough creative "to hit all the cohorts, "so just making one vanilla
piece of work," okay. - You know, we are too
infatuated with reach and not enough around relevance. And if you don't make 70, 400, 3000 pieces of meaningful content, you can never create actual relevance. - Yeah, okay. - But if you go walk
the streets right now, one of the worst words
in the creative community is volume and quantity. - That's very true, yeah. - And that needs to be cut, we need to have a more thoughtful
conversation around it. - Yeah, they're bad words at the moment. - They are, and so-- - Yeah, funny enough I was
at a Net, um, a Net, no god, an HBO session yesterday
where they were saying, "Oh, how can you increase your output "without, sort of, losing the secret sauce "of HBO, you know, volume, "and how can you do that
without sacrificing--" - Now, now that in the form of a one hour drama is a
far more interesting debate than trying to communicate
a toothpaste or a shampoo or a soda pop to the end consumer, right? You know, if I'm trying
to sell, what we know about long-form video,
theater, movies, television is some shows are not meant for everybody. We have four people here and that's okay. Meanwhile, we have this
audacious conversation that this 30 second spot is supposed to make everybody inspired to buy. - That's very true. - HBO does do a lot of creative. - Yeah, they do. - They have many different shows. If HBO was a creative agency,
they would have one show. - Yeah, I love that, (laughs) yeah, yeah. Yes, so that's a very important-- - Here's another one,
here's one of the report, and I know it's limited words,
but you do whatever you do, I'm gonna give you one more
point that's big for us. We are outrageously structured
on actual business results. Because my selfish ambition
is to own businesses, all the work we're doing is
actually trying to figure out how to drive businesses,
not maximize our revenue. And that has led us to
being more client-centric. Because I don't want to
necessarily be the most profitable, I wanna figure out if
my hypotheses are true. - Yeah. Can I-- - You can. - I'm assuming that your early career in wine and investing in Twitter, you know, gave you the kind of finances to kind of support your vision. - Yes, but you'll appreciate this. I take even more pride in
the fact that I know how to run a business and we
haven't raised any capital and we've been able to pay
the payroll every single week and it hasn't needed me
to include any capital from my personal self, so,
as you can tell by my answer, I'm very proud--
- You should be! - That I'm an actual business
operator, because a lot of people, you know, run
businesses that don't make money because they're getting VC capital and other people are running
businesses that over try to exact profit at the
expense of their clients because they're publicly traded. So, I feel like I have this
nice little middle zone. - Yeah, absolutely. So, you're gonna stick your
head above the parapet, you've come down here now. - Yes. - And you're gonna go, "Hey
guys I'm here, you know, "we're here and we're huge actually, "and you've never heard of
us or most of you haven't." How are you gonna go about
doing that in Cannes? What are you, are you just
walking around talking to people--?
- Slowly, slowly, yeah. You got it. I've been coming to
Cannes for seven years. - And you're not, you're
involved in any seminars? - I am, I am. I love speaking to the Young Lions, I just did a talk, I'm
not sure in where they-- (off camera muffled speaking) - Oh okay, fantastic. - You know, I'm doing this with you, like, but the reality is this. When you're running a marathon,
you do marathon behaviors. - Yeah, it's true. - And so the answer to
your question is patiently. (interviewer laughs) Which, you know, confuses people 'cause I have high energy as a human, and so they confuse my natural
DNA with my business behavior. You know, this is my
seventh year at Cannes. - Yes. - And so, even though I'm
high energy, and confident, and excited, I'm also respectful, and I didn't wanna scream
from the top of my lungs and, you know, I've been
patient, I've been learning. Now that we've got a little bit of a real, a business that, you
know, I think, you know, I'm flattered when
people are like, "Whoa!" You know, and now that I
understand the industry, now that I know where having
an independent shop in 10 years at this scale puts us in
the history of the industry. Not just right now, in the
history of the industry. How many people have gone from zero to 150 million independently
is very far and few between. I take a lot of pride in that and I enjoy being part of this industry, even though we might
be taking a little bit of a different point of view on it. - Yeah. This is fantastic. I'm going to unfortunately
stop you though. - Makes sense, 'cause you only
have so much limited time. - Well, it's not so much that
as I've got so few words...
