Gary Vaynerchuk is making a big bet on big brands.

In 2019, Vaynerchuk launched a small-business marketing agency called The Sasha Group. Today, he announced that it’s being rebranded as ChukMedia — and will now serve enterprise clients exclusively, just like his agency VaynerMedia does.

ChukMedia is already working with Subway, Utz, and DripDrop.

Why would Vaynerchuk build two enterprise-focused marketing agencies? It’s common within the creative world, where conglomerates like Omnicom and Publicis operate multiple agencies with different strategies. But moreso, Vaynerchuk says, he saw a unique opportunity — to serve a fundamental shift in how marketing works, and what large brands need to survive.

Big brands, he says, must move at the speed of culture. And they frequently don’t.

“The day of reckoning is here,” he says. “The people that are television commercial first, classic marketing, traditional first, or yesterday’s digital marketing first, are being upended by social-first agencies.”

The Speed Problem

Vaynerchuk’s diagnosis of big brand marketing is blunt: They’re too slow for today’s world.

He points to a pivotal moment from 2013, when the lights went out during the Super Bowl and Oreo quickly tweeted “You can still dunk in the dark.” (It was produced by creative agency 360i.) The tweet became the viral moment of that Super Bowl, back when brands were still learning how to play on social media. Within minutes of that tweet going live, Vaynerchuk sent a company-wide email with just one line: “Our company has changed forever.”

“We had been preaching for years about speed, volume, relevance at scale, social first,” he recalls. “Thirteen years later, I will tell you that that dream, that moment has been realized at scale.”

The problem is that most large brands still operate like it’s 2010, he says. They debate creative concepts in conference rooms for weeks. They run everything through legal and compliance. They optimize for brand safety over cultural relevance.

But successful marketing in 2026 requires a fundamental shift in how brands think about content and distribution.

“We’re redefining the mid funnel in marketing,” he explains. “It’s organic social media. Every company needs to invest as much money as humanly possible, cutting from every aspect of their business to funnel into a production capability, to make scaled social media content.”

This isn’t just about posting more on Instagram. Vaynerchuk is talking about a complete operational overhaul: “Content that is contextual to the distribution channel it’s posting on, whether that’s LinkedIn or YouTube shorts, Facebook or Snapchat Spotlight, even extending into things like Pinterest, podcasting and Substack.”

Then, he says, brands must follow what the market responds to. “When you are fortunate to have something perform, companies can send it down to the lower funnel — performance — and have media amplify that asset with a slight tweak,” he says. “But also, send it up to ‘brand land’ and consider spending millions of dollars to amplify an organic, successful piece of content, as if you would do on TV, or use it as the brief to do a campaign or something bigger.”

The key insight: Social media isn’t just social media. It’s what Vaynerchuk calls “interest media” — a way to test what your audience is interested in, and then use that creative to optimize the top and bottom of your marketing funnel.

Not Abandoning Small Business

Despite the enterprise focus of ChukMedia, Vaynerchuk says he’s not walking away from small business entirely.

“I’m a small business guy,” he says. “I have more deal flow and opportunity in SMB than I do in enterprise. So this is a strategic move to set up my next chess move.”

He says he has multiple small business-focused projects in development over the next year.