Blog

  • Twisties revives peak Aussie nostalgia with blue-tongue Sour Blueberry campaign via VaynerMedia Australia and Mango Communications

    Twisties revives peak Aussie nostalgia with blue-tongue Sour Blueberry campaign via VaynerMedia Australia and Mango Communications

  • What VaynerMedia’s John Terrana Wants You to Understand About Attention – AdMonsters

    What VaynerMedia’s John Terrana Wants You to Understand About Attention – AdMonsters

  • VaynerMedia’s International Boss: ‘Three Things Marketers Want, Gen AI, Australia & What Gary Vee Is Really Like’

    VaynerMedia’s International Boss: ‘Three Things Marketers Want, Gen AI, Australia & What Gary Vee Is Really Like’

  • Behind the Work: Launching “You Can’t Hide Great Taste” with Pepsi in APAC

    Behind the Work: Launching “You Can’t Hide Great Taste” with Pepsi in APAC

    In a category full of bold claims, we leaned into something quieter: real expressions that say everything without a word.

    At VaynerMedia APAC, we’ve been working closely with Pepsi on a new long-term platform that flips the traditional taste narrative on its head. It’s called ‘You Can’t Hide Great Taste’ and it’s all about capturing the real, unfiltered expressions people make the moment they taste something amazing.

    No copy-heavy product shots. No over-promising. Just instinctive, joyful reactions to bold flavor (the kind you can’t fake and definitely can’t hide).

    Shifting the Conversation Around Taste

    In a category where “great taste” is table stakes, our shared goal with Pepsi was to stop talking about taste and start showing how it feels. The creative idea centers on a universal truth: when something is so delicious, your face says it all.

    To bring that to life, we partnered with a street photographer, Ken Ekkapon  — someone who had never shot an ad before — to help us capture these blink-and-you-miss-it moments in the wild. The kind of spontaneous reactions you’d see in a candid Story or Reel, not a traditional ad.

    It’s a subtle but deliberate shift away from the brand telling people Pepsi tastes good, and toward letting consumers show it for themselves.

    A Long-Term Platform, Just Getting Started

    You Can’t Hide Great Taste is built to last, not just as a one-off campaign, but as a taste-first platform that will grow with Pepsi across the region.

    Right now, the work is live in Vietnam, the first of several APAC markets where the platform will eventually roll out. We’re still in the early stages, but the foundation is in place: a strong visual system, a recognizable creative signature (what we’re calling the “Taste Face”), and a clear direction for how taste can be communicated with real, human moments.

    Built for a Social-First Generation

    Everything about this work was designed with today’s content behaviors in mind. People scroll fast, they skip ads, and they value authenticity more than perfection. So we built a campaign around those behaviors — one that looks and feels like something your friend might post without thinking twice. We even created mini social films that tap into hilarious moments of your enjoyable Taste Face showing itself in the most inappropriate moments, like when your favourite KPop group breaks up, or when your boss cancels a holiday due to work.

    There’s no media trick here. Just a simple insight and a commitment to showing up honestly, which for a brand as iconic as Pepsi, is a bold move in itself.

    We’re excited to continue building and evolving You Can’t Hide Great Taste across the region.

    Credits:

    VaynerMedia Asia Pacific

    Krystle Morais – Creative Director, APAC

    Pat Chovalit – Associate Creative Director

    Siokkan Chow – Senior Art Director

    Natee Kangvankij– Senior Copywriter

    Vanichaya Tandasena – Designer

    Javier Vidal– Content Creator

    Plaa Kodchakorn– Content Creator

    Pitchaya Namsiri – Project Manager

    Natalie Brooker – Business Director

    Rarida Buppakarepatam – Account Director

    Dao Mutita – Account Director

     

    PepsiCo

    ⁠Masud Anwar – Senior Marketing Manager, Pepsi for Asia Business Unit

    ⁠Sabrina Yu – Marketing Manager, Pepsi for Asia Business Unit

    Usman Shahid – Marketing Director for Asia Business Unit

    Bernard Cheng – Chief Marketing Officer for Asia Business Unit

  • Contenders at Cannes 2025: Chicken vs Cheese vs The People: A National Flavour Election — PepsiCo | VaynerMedia

    Contenders at Cannes 2025: Chicken vs Cheese vs The People: A National Flavour Election — PepsiCo | VaynerMedia

  • Sometimes consulting is being brave enough to kill your 170-page playbook…

    Sometimes consulting is being brave enough to kill your 170-page playbook…

    We’ve been busy working with a leading property development company in the UK to modernise their marketing strategy. While they’re building amazing leisure destinations in real life, they’ve asked us to help build their brand on social—bringing it up to speed with modern life and putting social at the centre of their marketing efforts.

    Our Initial Marketing Audit

    The foundation of a project like this is always a good old audit. (Okay, we’ll stop with the building puns.) We started by reviewing where the brand sat alongside its competitors, how effective its current marketing was, and where opportunities for improvement were. In our next meeting, we took the client team through our strategy, creative thinking, and examples of what success might look like.

    The feedback? Over 170 pages of insights was way too long. Teams on the client side were getting lost in it—finding it hard to condense into tangible actions, and therefore couldn’t use what we’d shared. We confess, we got a bit carried away with ideas.

    An Actionable Social Framework That Actually Moves the Needle

    But there was a choice to make—about holding ourselves accountable and, ultimately, whether we were driving business results. So, we went back to basics. We audited client teams to find out what the most valuable bits of our initial work were and what was holding people back from using it effectively.

    Armed with new info, we were decisive with our editing and kept only the most valuable, tactical, and applicable content. The final contents included:

    • Our POV on the landscape of modern social
    • Audience cohorts – what they are and how to work with them
    • Social signals  – how they drive relevance and where to find them
    • Content creation tips to maximise attention
    • Amplification and measurement framework to track effectiveness

    Hands-On Implementation and Building a Social-First Culture

    We then got hands-on, helping local teams implement it at scale. Because we don’t build playbooks that sit on the shelf—we build practical solutions that teams can use every single day.

    Part of retraining teams to upskill and put social at the centre of their marketing is teaching. And we love to come in and work closely with people on just that. Now, we’re taking it one step further by placing one of our own strategists into a 3-month secondment with the client—helping to fully embed the handbooks and uncover any operational challenges or skills gaps.

    Adapting for Future Success

    It’s been such a positive experience partnering with a client that truly believes in and invests in a modern approach to marketing. They’re changing traditional boardroom views of social media—and we’re working alongside their marketing team to help make that happen.

    But the real success story here was having the humility to step back, take on feedback, and focus on what was most effective for our client. Our industry is full of agencies wedded to certain ways of doing things—whether that’s consulting, media buying, or the ways we make creative.

    The future of our industry—especially consulting—is about being adaptable and open to change.

  • Everything Is Everything. Change Comes Eventually. Will Media Owners Lead It? – AdMonsters

    Everything Is Everything. Change Comes Eventually. Will Media Owners Lead It? – AdMonsters

  • The secret to VaynerMedia’s upfront strategy this year | The Current

    The secret to VaynerMedia’s upfront strategy this year | The Current

  • Creative Dive: From Courtside Sip to a Cultural Moment with Pepsi and VaynerMedia

    Creative Dive: From Courtside Sip to a Cultural Moment with Pepsi and VaynerMedia

  • POSSIBLE 2025 Recap | The Shift to Owned > Earned > Paid

    POSSIBLE 2025 Recap | The Shift to Owned > Earned > Paid

    If your LinkedIn feed looked anything like mine, it was all POSSIBLE, all week. Now in its third year, the conference brought global names to Miami — Martha Stewart, Katie Couric, and of course, Gary Vee.

    Gary showed up with a clear message: the media playbook most marketers are still using is overdue for a rewrite. We’ve entered a new era — Owned > Earned > Paid.

    Today, the most effective brands — including many beloved Vayner clients — are leading with what they own: their channels, their content, their community. When a message hits, it earns attention organically. Only then is it worth amplifying with paid.

    We parked the VaynerX yacht just across from the main stage — a metaphor, perhaps, for how we like to do things. It quickly became a hub for off-the-record conversations about the future of marketing. Safe to say, we’ll be back.

    We Took the Mic and Talked O → E → P

     

    Gary’s keynote pulled no punches. His message was direct: attention isn’t something you can just buy anymore. It has to be earned — through content that’s relevant, timely, and respects how people actually consume media.

    I joined a panel hosted by The Female Quotient alongside Thatiana Diaz, Pedr Howard, and Sheereen Miller-Russell, where we dug into what this looks like in practice. One theme stood out: today’s audiences are building their own content ecosystems — and brands need to bring something valuable to earn a spot inside them.

    Over at Adweek House, our Chief Business Officer Kaylen McNamara explored how cultural context — not just targeting or trends — is what sets breakthrough campaigns apart.

    Breakfast with a POV (and a View)

     

    We kicked off our week with a marketers breakfast co-hosted with Vistar Media — strong coffee, stronger opinions. A few takeaways that stuck:

    • Good content has long legs. With the right distribution strategy, it can spark again and again.
    • OOH and social aren’t separate worlds. When you link creative across both, the impact multiplies.

    Silos slow things down. Real momentum happens when creative, media, and strategy work as one.

    Retail Media, Evolved

     

    Later that day, we shifted to a more intimate conversation — a private leadership lunch with Chase Media Solutions. Lauren Griewski spoke to how Chase is using real transaction data (with care and intention) to power smarter, more relevant campaigns. 

    We kept the conversation going with a special Marketing for the Now episode, recorded live from the yacht. Gary and I welcomed top marketers to share how they’re adapting in real time — and what they’re doing differently in the face of so much change.

    Content, Captured

    You know VaynerX is NOT going to miss a content opportunity… So we partnered with our friends at Shutterstock to capture the week’s moments as they unfolded. From sunrise sessions to sunset panels, they were everywhere, and helped us share the energy in real time (peep the gallery!). We also co-hosted programming throughout the week with Shutterstock’s Chief Enterprise Officer, Aimee Eagan — a true highlight

    CMO Circle: Streaming x Creator Culture

     

    To wrap, we brought together Gary and Tubi’s Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Lucas for a conversation on how streaming and creator culture are converging. From community-built storytelling to new measurement models, the message was clear: the way brands connect with audiences is evolving fast, and on awesome platforms like Tubi.

    We’ll be continuing the conversation in Cannes this June. Want to be part of it? Register here.