Stop Selling Unseen Vanilla

Most big brand marketing is invisible, irrelevant, and built on fake metrics

Selling unseen vanilla is the death of big brands.

By that, I mean that the biggest issue for big companies today is they make campaigns that are so generic because they’re trying to capture it all.

You look at Toyota. “Let’s go places.” Then they make a video that’s like a car driving and it’s like, “Let’s go places,” and obviously it’s called “Let’s Go Places” because that means anything and everything. But by nature, that’s vanilla.

So they make these vanilla ads, and then they think outdoor billboards and television commercials are how people are going to see them. The industry continues to sell, “Well, this many people are going to see your billboard, this many people are going to watch your commercial.”

But that’s not true. There’s something called GRPs: a legacy media metric that estimates how many people could see an ad, not how many actually do.

Brands are buying digital impressions and GRPs that aren’t true. Those are all about potential reach, not actualized reach. So I call this unseen vanilla. The ad is not being seen, and the content is vanilla.

That’s game over.

There’s a Better Way: Organic Social

What we believe brands should do instead is create content for many different consumer segmentations with a focus on relevance, not brand consistency.

When something performs well organically, you put media behind it. When it does not perform well, you do not. Not a dollar of media should be spent on creative that does not get views organically. Organic social becomes the validator that something was actually seen. If it was seen organically, it means it was relevant, then you put media behind it.

What I also want everyone to get into is sampling cups, like Baskin-Robbins.

Instead of an unseen bowl of vanilla ice cream, my thesis is that the way you actually build a brand and a business is by having Baskin-Robbins sampling cups at scale. That is social media creative posts.

They’re losing relevance because vanilla is not relevant. You need rocky road and mint chocolate chip and cherry Garcia and strawberry and everything else. And if it’s not being seen, what’s the punchline anyway? Even if an ad is seen in a TV commercial, it’s expensive to be seen. Social media is free, and it’s where so much attention lives.

The First Step: Education and Suffocation

When a brand starts working with us, it’s all about education. Most agencies don’t know this stuff. When the client pushes back, they fold because they just want to keep the client.

We stand for something. We’d rather lose the client than go into these old ways of thinking.

It’s education and conviction. Most clients, after we give them three or four hours of consulting, come out the other side realizing it’s true. So many brands will say: “Our brand awareness is up. Our impressions are up.”

But their business is down.

Why Brands Drift Back to Vanilla

VaynerMedia’s biggest problem is when clients don’t follow my conviction from the selling through the day to day. They, over time, get away from the model and go back to subjective vanilla content.

Why are we here? The world was more monolithic in 1973. Everybody liked the same stuff. The content could be vanilla and it still got viewed because people watched commercials. People didn’t have cell phones.

Now, we can all walk or drive by a billboard and not see it because we’re distracted, or we’re walking on the sidewalk looking at our phone. Vanilla that was seen worked back in the day, but now attention is fragmented.

I’m religiously important to some people, but most people don’t know who I am. That wasn’t the way it used to be. So the fragmentation of attention mandates specificity.

In 1982, you wouldn’t make a TV commercial targeting Jets fans who are into wine. It would cost too much. You were forced into vanilla.

Now you can get really specific at a low cost and target. The distribution of the world mandated more vanilla content because it was expensive and they didn’t have optionality.

The “Vanilla Frankenstein” Problem

Years ago, we used to pitch that what everybody did in the television era was what we called “vanilla Frankenstein.” By that, we meant that brands needed one message to go to everybody, so they created something that kind of worked for the broadest possible audience.

Now we usually talk about the alternative to our model as vanilla Frankenstein: Brands are still trying to get to one idea and push it everywhere, but the interest graph responds to depth of intentionality and nuance.

In order to get to one big idea, you have to go very vanilla because you are trying to reach everyone. But by trying to reach everyone, you end up reaching no one.

The vanilla idea also comes from an age where a lot of brands pay for what we call “potential reach.” The assumption is that the audience will see this thing because you interrupted the middle of their show. Actual consumption and relevance are what we talk about striving for. Vanilla is a recipe to get even less actual consumption.

Even if someone does pay attention during your ad break, which they probably will not because they are on their phone, that piece of vanilla is like, “I don’t want that flavor.” It does not appeal to me in any way.

The bigger point for 2026 is our operating thesis that brands are spending an ungodly amount of media dollars on creative that is not being seen. The creative is not relevant.

But brands don’t know that it’s not working because the media math says it got views and passed internal Media Mix Modeling (MMM) benchmarks. There is all this reporting that reinforces the behavior, and that’s why so many big brands still do this today.

In other words, why do so many creative and marketing executions die? Because the leaders are delusional, insecure, and entitled instead of leaning into humility, data, truth, and method.

The Two Things Killing Big Brands

The two things that are killing modern Fortune 500 companies are the campaign mindset and fake reports. The campaign mindset is when humans sit around in a room and guess the idea. We come up with a slogan like “hotter than hot,” or “start your day fresh,” or “pick me up.” We think we guessed it right.

Then we bet the farm on it with billboards, television, print, and we push that one idea everywhere. That made sense when there weren’t other options, but now we have the internet, social media, AI, and constant feedback. Sitting in a room and guessing the campaign is crazy.

The second problem is fake reports. Reports that try to measure brand and justify the work even when the business results are not there. Companies become obsessed with measuring brand, and they spend all this time trying to prove the long-term effect on the business. The reality is it becomes the excuse and the justification for bad short-term work.

“We’re not getting sales, but look, the brand measured well.”

I’ll give you a real example, because I was watching the SAG Awards on Netflix, and they had commercials. You’re not used to commercials on Netflix, so when they came on I noticed them. I saw Jennifer Garner in one of them.

But here’s the problem. I have no idea what the brand was. I remember Jennifer Garner….I don’t remember the brand.

Views Are the Truth

I value the actual results and the insights more than the opinion. Subjective opinion is not zero, but I don’t value it for too long, because then it becomes less valuable than just proceeding and making another edit.

We’re in the first year of where views are the truth. For a long time it was just whatever the people in suits wanted, plus whatever the media numbers said. That hid the truth.

If you made a video and you were lucky enough that it was a commercial and Honda or McDonald’s spent $52 million and everybody saw it, one could argue, “Oh, that’s good.”

But was it? Was there a better video to be made that would have sold more cars or burgers? The answer is yes.

We should post 100 pieces of quality creative, rather than four-hour meetings for three pieces of creative. We should put it out, let it hit the feed, and let the views be the truth.