Social Commerce Trends: Gary Vee’s No-Holds-Barred Q&A at POSSIBLE 2025

On April 28, 2025, the POSSIBLE Marketing Expo 2025 commenced its three-day event at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, attracting over 5,200 marketing professionals. A session titled “No-Holds-Barred Q&A: Gary Vee on Social Commerce, Virtual Influencers & Gen Z” took place from 4:20 PM to 4:50 PM ET at the Coastal Center 4th Floor Purpose Pavilion in the Pearl Ballroom. Gary Vaynerchuk, Chairman of VaynerX, was featured as a keynote under the Gen Z Insights & Emerging Social Trends track.

Gary Vee’s Insights on Social Commerce Trends

The session began with an introduction of Gary Vaynerchuk, spotlighting his transformative influence on marketing through social media. Vaynerchuk, who turned his father’s wine business into a $50 million internet phenomenon, has built an empire that includes VaynerMedia, a digital ad agency creating content and managing media for major brands. He sharply criticized the industry’s dependence on outdated practices, cautioning that agencies and brands face irrelevance unless they evolve.

Vaynerchuk opened his keynote by emphasizing the shift in social commerce trends, urging brands to prioritize organic social media creative over traditional paid media strategies to effectively reach Gen Z audiences. He argued that creative now drives reach based on relevance, a game-changer for marketers.

Gary Vaynerchuk

The biggest opportunity in marketing is finding loose teeth in your house. I believe over the last 70 years of marketing, working media dollars have been used to disguise bad creative, and I believe that we are now living in the era of working media dollars being used to amplify good creative. And I do not believe our industry is actually doing that. I want to compel people to understand how real this is. It sits in a classic marketing framework, which is a lot of people have been in the mindset of paid, owned, earned, and I believe we’re actually living in the owned, earned, paid era. Any Fortune 5000 company that is not remarkably over-investing in organic social media creative is making a fundamental strategic mistake. Social networks are desperate for that content to reach an audience that’s actually interested in it, so that you all stay on the platform so they can sell more ads. It’s the greatest opportunity for marketers ever, ever. For the first time in marketing history, the creative creates reach. That’s insane. And it creates reach based on relevance. For seven years, we have been guessing in boardrooms through our egos and our politics on what the campaign or commercial should be, and then spend an ungodly amount of money disguising that it was probably a piece of shit. We’re in a crisis where if we don’t prove value through sales, we will not exist.

Addressing Gen Z and Emerging Trends

Vaynerchuk opted for a Q&A format to engage the audience directly, encouraging attendees to line up with questions about social commerce trends, virtual influencers, and strategies to connect with Gen Z. He stressed the importance of relevance in content, noting that social networks now prioritize interest over connections.

Gary Vaynerchuk

I’d rather go into Q&A to see if there’s a nuance underneath the thesis. Social networks run on relevance. Relevance creates consideration, which leads to buying. The biggest tech infrastructures in the world have algos where we post on social that are desperate for that content to reach an audience that’s actually interested in it. We can post at scale with content that is relevant, see that human beings, not us in the industry, care about it, and have the ability to amplify it or campaign on top of it. I believe a paid, owned, earned model is broken. In fact, every business that I own, the ones that are on that screen or anything that I’m the chairman of the board of or a very disproportionate investor in, has in 2025 gone to a model where we do not spend one dollar of working media until it has been affirmed organically on social. There is actually, if I may, with all due respect, zero reason to spend media dollars amplifying any piece of creative that has not been affirmed with organic reach in 2025. Yet, 99.9% of the brands represented here at agencies will do such. It’s black and white.

Elliot, an audience member, asked how the industry can track authentic engagement in this new era. Vaynerchuk pointed to VaynerMedia’s focus on sales as the ultimate metric. He cited a case where a client’s video gained 36 million views and significantly boosted sales.

Elliot

What does the industry do to track authentically, accurately, without vanity metrics?

Gary Vaynerchuk

A brand we work on, normally getting 300 views, got 36 million views on a video, and in 72 hours, its Amazon rank went from 437,000 to the thousands, selling an obscene amount of product. The only thing VaynerMedia has measured for 15 years is sales. Organically earned views lead to sales—it’s black and white. There’s a 100% correlation to organically earned views and business results, like with Chili’s or Abercrombie and Fitch. The data’s too compelling to ignore, no matter how much some wanna hold on to yesterday.

Another attendee, a creator with 500,000 TikTok followers, asked how brands without intellectual property can build evergreen organic strategies. Vaynerchuk urged brands to allocate significant budgets to social creative production and leverage creators to amplify their reach.

Attendee

How do brands build evergreen, organic creative strategy with tenfold moments to optimize on?

Gary Vaynerchuk

For a company like Dr. Pepper spending $100 million, I’m asking for $20 million for social production. Multi-billion dollar companies are getting outspent by smaller brands in the most important channel today because they don’t understand what’s happening. Brands without IP can leverage creators to put out content, but they need to understand they’re not even in the game financially. Smaller brands going from zero to $50 million a year are living in a social organic first framework, outflanking Fortune 500 brands who spend $900,000 on a party at Costco instead.

Vaynerchuk also addressed the importance of identifying super fans. Additionally, he suggested that data tools can help brands engage authentically with their most loyal customers.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Everyone wants to know and identify who their super fans are. People will continue to build CRMs—there’s tons of startups, new startups like WAP and others that are giving you the data instead of it being owned by the social networks. The blockchain is an incredibly important technology that will continue to grow. That data, I feel more comfortable with, has mask or has optionality. The question is how many people understand that their heavy users or their super fans are actually a disproportionate impact on their business. That gets a little blurry, but the ability to identify and manage and engage, those pipes are in place. For the people in this room that are paying attention, every day on social, on TikTok and Instagram, there is a video that is going viral that is creating more financial impact on brands than every TV commercial that that brand has run in the last several years—it’s just real life.

A Call to Action for Marketers

The “No-Holds-Barred Q&A: Gary Vee on Social Commerce, Virtual Influencers & Gen Z” session at POSSIBLE 2025 delivered actionable insights for marketers. Gary Vaynerchuk’s focus included social commerce trends. He prioritized organic social media creative, relevance-driven reach, and sales as the ultimate metric. This challenged traditional marketing models and offered a blueprint for success. His critique of the industry’s resistance to change underscored the urgency for brands and agencies to adapt. Otherwise, they risk irrelevance.

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Photo Credit: POSSIBLE 2025 by Shutterstock