Flanked by Paris Hilton, Gary Vee claims adland has ‘been lying to itself’ about reach
In a bizarre sofa session alongside socialite Paris Hilton, VaynerX and Vaynermedia founder Gary Vaynerchuk, aka Gary Vee, took to the stage at Cannes Lions to denounce the ad industry for “lying to itself for 20 years about reach.”
Gary Vee’s wild Cannes conspiracy claims were made during a panel on NFTs alongside Paris Hilton
On Tuesday June 23, during a session called ‘The NFT Revolution,’ Vee kicked back and blasted an audience of creatives for allegedly misleading clients for two decades about the value of reach. He says: “We’ve defined the work as a TV commercial, there’s not a human on Earth that is actually consuming them.”
The unlikely pair were on stage to discuss the opportunities for marketers presented by blockchain technology in regards to the NFT revolution, but Vee went off on an expletive-laden tangent, denigrating the entire industry for their alleged complicity in a mammoth conspiracy to defraud gullible advertisers.
Letting rip, Vee said: “I think the biggest thing that web3 will do is expose pre-internet and even internet realities that I think this industry has been built [on], which is this industry has for far too long, over the last 30-plus years, been obsessed with reach. It is the currency, and a lot of the executives here know exactly what I am talking about.
“The problem with that is for the last 20 years this industry’s been lying to itself and its clients on the actual consumption of the reach. There’s nothing more full of shit on earth than GRPs and internet impressions.”
An obsession with chasing shadows rather than flesh-and-blood consumers leads Vee to judge the industry guilty of pumping out “vanilla bullshit creative.” Doubling down on his flavor analogy, Vee emphasized his point by turning the air blue. “This industry has forced remarkably creative people to make fucking vanilla bullshit.”
Vee’s provocative outburst set the stage for the roll-out of web3, an event he regards will reshape the advertising industry by ushering in a new era of ‘clear data’ where everything is verified.