How VaynerX’s CMO Is ‘Dogfooding’ B2B Virality
Life as chief marketing officer for VaynerX is kind of an unusual one, as Avery Akkineni recognises. An agency like VaynerX exists to help clients grow their brands and businesses through a variety of social-first brand-building tactics. It’s Avery’s job to apply that to VaynerX’s own brands.
Of course, unlike most, her agency is led by a figure who actual normal people outside of marketing know about. The magnetic Gary Vaynerchuk, chairman and chief executive officer of VaynerMedia, is where brand’s values come from, but as Avery notes, “there's a whole brand that sort of halos around Gary of VaynerX.”
As a CMO marketing to CMOs, she tries to set an example in how the VaynerX brands market themselves. “Dogfooding” – trying what the agency is trying to sell for itself, is key. Avery is focused on “really practising what we preach on behalf of Vayner. So I think about my role as a B2B marketer. My job is to build the brand of Vayner and drive the relevance of Vayner for our target audience, which is Fortune 500 marketers [and] enterprise marketers around the world. The way that message needs to be delivered is different in London than it is in Lisbon, than it is in New York.”
It’s something that she finds “really fun,” but admits it’s also a lot of pressure. “We need to be able to do ‘Day Trading Attention’ ourselves, with a very lean team and with a limited budget and with limited resources, but with absolutely exponential potential for what we can do.”
Avery is particularly proud of how the company has been practicing what it preaches recently. “We've had our own renaissance on social media as VaynerMedia. Over the past couple of months, we've done a big transformation of how we embody social virality in the B2B world. We now often have million-view hits on platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube, and that's so fun to see because we have a very small team who works on this at VaynerMedia.”
She admits that you might presume that is easy with thousands of employees to hand, but the team putting out content for the VaynerMedia brand itself is just a handful of people. “It's amazing that we are able to produce these million-view hits. Clients see them a lot, and it just really underscores us eating our own dog food – trying things first, practising what we preach. So that's something I've been proud of in the last few months.”
At VaynerX, Avery’s team groups marketing leaders into cohorts, and markets to them in different ways accordingly, using social media to do what the agency believes in most – to build brand, drive business results, and ultimately drive relevance. “That’s exactly how we think about it on behalf of our brand as well,” says Avery. “How can we create content that’s going to win over that brand marketer, that ABM, who follows Gary Vee on social?” That could be something like the post that the EMEA team did around Advertising Week Europe while British social media was awash with ‘tea alarm’ pranks. “That might make sense for that right-out-of-college, ABM-level marketer. But maybe a CMO stuck in a previous decade (or century) wouldn't.
“If we think about that person, we think, what do they pay attention to? What are the sources that they consider credible,” says Avery. “Maybe they read Little Black Book. Maybe they want to speak on a panel at SXSW London. Maybe that's something that matters to their comms team. We'll understand where they get their information, what they consider relevant, what they consider important, and then engineer a strategy there.”
Honesty is at the heart of everything VaynerX does, including how it promotes its own offering. “We never try to convince. I feel that is something that is honestly usually a futile effort,” says Avery. “But what we do is share our truth, and that truth needs to be packaged up in different ways, depending on who that cohort is.”
That could apply to which side of the multifaceted chairman the agency focuses on. For certain marketers, seeing Gary not as a social media star but as a business executive who's leading a multi-thousand-person company is the appropriate context.
Marketing an agency is the same as so many brands from there, following a funnel of some kind. “It all starts with awareness,” says the VaynerX CMO. “And we're big believers that awareness matters, but relevance matters more. Not only what is VaynerMedia, but why is VaynerMedia relevant to me? That might mean us doing our homework, us doing a dinner, us doing thought leadership pieces, us doing them a favour. Maybe their kid needs an internship. Maybe they're interested in their own personal brand on LinkedIn and how they can sharpen that up. Understanding how we can be relevant to them in that context. And then, of course, introducing our work and finding the right way to show how we can ultimately help them. Once people see it, and they see the power that relevance can really help, that usually opens the door for us.”
VaynerX’s marketing efforts aren’t like other agencies’, in several ways. One way being that pitches don’t figure heavily in Avery’s working life. “This is going to be something that's probably unusual, but I haven't been a part of that many pitches,” she says. Although her career at VaynerX has seen her bring in dozens of new clients, very few were through the process that traditional advertising agencies gear themselves towards. “That isn't really the key to our growth at Vayner,” she says. Instead, it’s more organic, through relationships and through people who see the agency’s communications.
“That's really my job as CMO,” she says. “To get people into our marketing funnel, if you will, through different things, whether that's press or events or our emails or our content[...] The best part is, we have a whole team that deals with all of that. My job is just to be at the top to create the relevance. And then, of course, I have deep relationships with many of our clients, so I stay involved in different things. If they ever need anything, I'm a phone call or text away, 24/7, like any agency person. But it's very rarely done through a pitch[...] For us, doing marketing in our own style certainly leads to business results.”
The Gary Vee factor is something that’s hard to underestimate as a marketing asset for the agency. “He creates such an incredibly powerful halo,” says Avery. “His brand introduces many to just the idea of Vayner, and Gary is still very actively involved as the CEO of the company, which is unusual for a company of our shape and size and 15 offices all across the globe – to have a founder who is still making TikToks himself every single day[...] that is incredibly helpful for us in different ways. In the US, Gary is a huge lead driver – people see his content, and they want to work with him in some capacity. I think that's one thing that will certainly never go away.”
In other markets, his personal brand is not so widespread. A slide that says “Founded by Gary Vee,” might resonate really well in New York, but may need changing for Japan. “It plays in different ways depending on where we are across the world. Certainly, Gary's philosophies apply to our thinking in the way that we go to market worldwide, but using him as a context driver is something that really works in certain markets, and in other markets it's more important for us to show the work that we've done in that market, who our leadership is in that market, and very often it's a combination of both of those factors.”
A business the size of VaynerX can’t be built on a single personality of course. “The reality is, Gary can't be everywhere always, and our work and our teams need to stand on their own two feet and legs. It's always one of my favourite things in the world when companies come to us and have never heard of Gary,” admits Avery.
Being VaynerX, even the B2B marketing strategy is social first. And Avery is convinced that many of the same principles apply. “A lot of this is because of the TikTok-ification of all of social media. We believe that short-form video in 2025 is the thing that continues to captivate consumer attention, and that's what we're seeing take-off, regardless of where you are in the world.”
Avery’s VaynerX career has spanned geography. She built the APAC office from the ground up to over 150 employees in two years and also served as the managing director for VaynerMedia LATAM in 2024 before taking on her current global role. In terms of company culture, she’s proud of the consistency across borders. “It all feels like one Vayner,” she says. “We did a really fun campaign in December to celebrate our 15-year anniversary, where we sent four employees all across the world to visit all the 15 Vayner offices. And the feedback that we got from that was that if you walk into a Vayner office, whether you are in Miami or Mexico City, you feel like you're walking into a Vayner office.”
One uniting principle is the extremely Gary-esque ‘Honey Empire’ idea: “kindness and empathy in the workplace, matched with a very work-hard, figure-out-how-to-do-it mentality.
“I think that's the secret sauce of Vayner,” she adds. “It's very American, but at the end of the day, we are an American agency, and that comes through everywhere we are in the world as well.” She points to Marcus Krzastek, who was recently named president of international for VaynerMedia. He has been with the company since it was four people in a conference room. Now he's running this 600-person team of VaynerMedia International, which Avery calls “a testament to the fact that Honey Empire has worked from day one.”
She says the balance is 51% honey – “kindness and culture and doing the right thing, even when that's a hard thing” – and 49% empire. “We're very ambitious. We believe that we're building the modern agency of record for the future. And that takes hard work. That means we have to push ourselves hard, always be innovating, always be trying new things. And that's not easy all the time either. But by combining these two things, we're able to unlock what might feel impossible to many.”
