Gary Vaynerchuk , the entrepreneur and social media marketing veteran behind VaynerX , is not one to understate things. When he took the stage at Expo West in Anaheim earlier this year to talk consumer packaged goods, he made a remark about natural flavors that spread quickly across the industry. It was vintage Vaynerchuk: unfiltered, pointed and just provocative enough to travel far beyond the room.

Now, he is channeling that energy into a new social media and brand-building agency.

VaynerX recently launched Tamara Group , formally known as The Attention, Media, And Relevance Agency. Named in tribute to his mother, Tamara Vaynerchuk, it is the third agency in the VaynerX ecosystem alongside VaynerMedia and ChukMedia.

The agency debuted with clients including Ulta Beauty, Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day, method, and is led by Ryan Harwood, who also serves as CEO of Gallery Media Group, VaynerX's publishing arm.

I spoke with Vaynerchuk shortly after the launch about what sets Tamara Group apart, how businesses, big and small, can build a winning social media strategy and what artificial intelligence and the analog comeback mean for the future of marketing.

While Vaynerchuk may be building another company himself, his advice stands true, he says, for small businesses as well: content is an essential, and relatively low-cost, way to grow business. The challenging factor is the amount of content needed to churn out, which many businesses may struggle with.

Esha Chhabra: At Expo West this year, your comment about natural flavors went viral. I was in the audience. It got me thinking: how do you create authentic social media content when you’re running an agency with real client obligations?

Gary Vaynerchuk : Yes, if you’re willing to be a person that is willing to make hard decisions. I am always willing to lose money if I want to communicate something that’s important to me. And you know me today. What you don't know is through my 20s and early 30s, when I had no money, I was also willing to lose the little bit that I had. Just because I'm a well-parented human being, I got very fortunate.

Chhabra: Tamara Group is described as a production-first social media agency. Can you explain what that means for someone who isn’t familiar with how Madison Avenue typically works?

Vaynerchuk : Most creative agencies still look like Mad Men. People come up with ideas randomly and then make it a campaign for TV, launch it and then hope it does well. And someone else makes it. So Don Draper comes up with it and a separate company makes it.

We really innovated in this industry in two ways. One, for the same price as you would pay someone to come up with an idea you can pay us to come up with lots of ideas and make all of it. Wildly efficient. Two, most people don’t understand this: it's hard to make social media content that does well. You can't hide behind the media like you do on television, or the awards, or a great headline in a great magazine. And so we also got good at it. And that's kind of why we've exploded.

Chhabra: Why hasn’t another social media agency replicated this model at scale?

Vaynerchuk : It's hard. I actually understand why we don't have a lot of actual competitors.

Most of the people that are big like us are holding on to yesterday, because it's got more margin in it. And then the little characters that are building, I'm humbled by a lot of them. I have a hundred emails a year from people starting competitive Vaynerchuks inspired by me, and I think they knew it when they sent the email. I write right back and say good luck. I think the world is abundant.

But it’s hard, and I understand business, but it took us also 10 years to grow it. A lot of people don’t have that stomach to eat crap for a decade. And most people that start agencies started to sell them to another agency.

Chhabra: 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the analog comeback. Gen Alpha is reportedly disconnecting from social media and the internet. Does that concern you or is it just the next pendulum swing?

Vaynerchuk : No, I'm leaning into it. The announcement I'm giving you the preview of: we're going to be talking quite a bit about our experiential capabilities. We're going to win because we're going to film it and create social media content that's better than anyone in the world for the same price. So I'm very bullish.

Extreme AI, extreme analog. Don't get caught in the middle. I don't think it's a mini trend. I think it's the beginning of a macro trend. But I think everyone's going to think, like always, about "or" and I think about "and."

I think they’ll be more digital than ever in three years, but I think you’ll see more analog than people anticipate also. And then you have live shopping, and then you have the rise of the creator entrepreneur, institutional businesses built by humans like myself, or Alex or Mr. Beast or Steven Bartlett. There’s a lot of cool trends brewing.

Chhabra: Many of the brands you work with are traditional companies just beginning to build a social media strategy. Is social-first the only effective approach to brand building today?

Vaynerchuk : It's the most effective way to do it. Grüns sold in six months for $1.2 billion, that does not happen. Poppi does not happen. Liquid Death does not happen. It's not the only way, there's no "only."

It is disproportionately the most cost-effective way for a net new brand to go from zero to $250 million. Or from a brand that does a billion or two billion or three billion, to stop wasting money that's helping them decline and start accelerating from two billion to three billion by spending in a social-first framework.

And a social-first framework doesn’t mean you don't do outdoor or television or print. It's that you win meaningfully in social and then understand what to do in those other channels. Fortune 500 companies will spend so much more money on working media dollars in traditional digital, and in creative and production for traditional channels, than they will in social creative brand building. And that is why they're missing so much and that is why the ones that are figuring it out are growing so much with us.

Chhabra: Every major platform is now launching AI tools to speed up social media content creation. Does that threaten your business model?

Vaynerchuk : I don't sit here with delusion and naivete hoping that AI doesn't. I think for us, we're really, really going to be good at analog. And what's really awesome about social is you can measure it.

So if a company does the creative internally with AI and when they post it in social, if it doesn't get views, it doesn't get views. Most of them will hide it by spending media against it, to make it look like it did well.

But we are good at culture, we are good at ideas. If execution gets commoditized, I respect that, and that will become something that has less margin in it or less value. And we will adjust, and there is no doubt that that will happen.

I think the thing that most people don't understand, though, is the sheer volume of creative that is going to be needed.

My personal brand “Gary Vee” posted 500 pieces of creative a month. I can’t get clients to post 500 a month and these are multi-trillion dollar companies. But that is going to be the cost of entry. Volume is a cost of entry. And that gets all the brand people's emotions in a bunch, because they've decided, audaciously, that quantity is at the expense of quality.

Chhabra: You’ve watched brand marketing evolve for decades. Does it frustrate you that the debate over quality versus quantity in social media content still rages on?

Vaynerchuk : It is about quality. Quantity, I think you’ll appreciate this, quantity is not debatable. The quality is. Quality is subjective and comes in a trillion shapes and sizes. As you ladies know, modern female fashion: you'll carry a handbag and a $9 T-shirt and a $5,000 blouse and eight-dollar sandals. That is a high-low mix.

That has been accepted, finally, by women in fashion, but it's not been accepted in advertising. Quality cannot be the fidelity or the cost or the audacious opinion of someone who claims to be creative but wasn't good enough to go to Hollywood. I'm a businessman that happens to love marketing because marketing is the offensive business. I'm not here for the sake of marketing, like many of my contemporaries are.

I lead with humility even though it's surrounded with dramatic forms of conviction, and my conviction is grounded in business results, not in Cannes Lions or headlines or fake reports.

Chhabra: If a small business doesn’t have the budget, or capacity to produce as much content, what would you advise?

Vaynerchuk : For small businesses, the margin for error is way smaller because every marketing dollar matters. While they may not be able to produce 500 pieces of content a month, they should spend as much time and energy as possible making quality organic social creative before spending a dollar on working media or large campaign production. Organic social is the best way to validate messaging, learn what actually resonates, and reduce the risk on every dollar you spend. The businesses winning today are often not the biggest, they are the fastest, the most consistent, and the most native to the platforms people actually use. In today’s algorithm driven world, relevance beats polish, which gives small businesses a real chance to compete above their weight class without massive budgets.