VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk tells retail marketers to ditch brand lift studies, post on LinkedIn and prepare a live selling strategy in his NRF ’26 keynote address.

Every business has a profound opportunity to create viral content on social media, Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of marketing agency VaynerMedia, told attendees in his keynote address at the National Retail Federation conference NRF ’26 Jan. 13, in New York City.

Vaynerchuk, or “GaryVee,” was among the early YouTube bloggers in 2006 and built his following to now have more than 45 million followers across all his social media channels. Today, an individual or business can amass that type of following overnight with their first TikTok video because social media algorithms favor relevancy, he said.

“First mover advantage on platforms that have attention is always a good idea, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get attention even though it’s mature,” Vaynerchuk said. “There are people that are going to explode on YouTube, Substack, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and every other platform that are literally going to start tomorrow because they have figured out something of value that the end consumer’s interested in.”

And that’s a big opportunity for every brand. Vaynerchuk shared more claims in his NRF ’26 keynote.

Marketing Success Shows Up at the Cash Register

Vaynerchuk advocated for retailers to keep their creative and media departments together so there is no discrepancy if the marketing is performing.

“All of us are looking at metrics that are reporting and data for the sake of reporting and data,” he said. “The great thing about being a retailer, unlike being a CPG or some other category, is it shows up at the cash register.”

Retailers should be measuring their working media dollars in terms of short-term sales or increasing life-time value. “It’s uncomfortably simple to measure. Corporate is bad at it,” Vaynerchuk said.

Stop Basing Decisions on ‘Fake Reporting’

In tandem with this, retailers should stop creating reports to measure brand affinity and loyalty. These gauges of consumer sentiment are not as tangible of a measurement as sales and repeat purchases, he said.

“Our whole industry is built on fake reports,” he said.

While the old formula of relevancy to consideration to purchase still holds, brands can test how well their creative resonates with their audience by posting it on social media. Then, brands can measure the success of the marketing based on the number of consumers who viewed it across all the social networks. Brands should measure this monthly, in total and per post, Vaynerchuk said.

“We’re now clearly in the era of let’s use working media dollars only to amplify and scale good creative,” he said. “And good is judged by, did it actually achieve views, not four executives in a room saying, ‘That’s on brand.’”

Use Validated Organic Content for Performance Marketing

Instead of working on building a following, Vaynerchuk recommends retailers instead work on creating content that consumers want to engage with and then the audience will follow.

If a marketer has a piece of organic content that had high consumer engagement, Vaynerchuck recommends for the marketing team to take it, tweak it slightly to have a performance angle, and then put paid media behind it.

“The creative has been validated by the algo,” he said referring to social media algorithms. “People like that creative. You bring it back home and slap on ‘Free shipping’ or ‘Two for one.’ You give it a performance element. Don’t change it so much that you took the essence out of it that made it relevant.”

Even B2C Marketers Need to use LinkedIn

Retail marketers know they need to have a presence where consumer eyeballs are, and often that’s on many social media platforms. Vaynerchuk recommends for retailers not to overlook the professional networking platform LinkedIn.

While the use case for business-to-business brands to market on LinkedIn is obvious, Vaynerchuk said that business-to-consumer brands should still try to capture the audience that is there. Even though those consumers are likely using the platform for a business purpose, they are still human beings with interests, he said. Marketers should hook the consumer with something relevant to the platform like a business application, such as “Are you traveling for work all the time?” and then transition to the product.

Retailers Need to Plan and Invest in Live Selling, AEO and GEO

Retailers that aren’t spending an “enormous amount of time” planning their live shopping strategy and GEO and AEO strategy are setting themselves up for a challenging 2027 and 2028, Vaynerchuk said.

Live selling, such as the formula QVC does on TV, is common in China. It’s only a matter of time before this format is more mainstream in the U.S, he predicts.

Vaynerchuk referenced the Whatnot app, which amassed more than $6 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, according to eMarketer estimates. The app is popular in China, although it currently has low U.S. adoption, he said. Other apps such as TikTok, Twitch and eBay all have live selling tools that retail marketers need to have a strategy for, he said.