We repost from Mark Ritson’s blog more than any other [1]. That’s because he’s usually on the right side of marketing issues (in our opinion) and he’s entertaining to read. On the downside, he’s very, very long to read.
Ritson takes on Gary Vaynerchuk the proper way. He doesn’t criticise personally, other than by using a particularly unflattering photo of his opponent. He refutes five of Garyvee’s popular media theories with facts. Novel in these times and apparently not the way Vaynerchuk rolls. Dr Ritson uses UK-based research, but it’s at least directionally valid for North America, Vaynerchuk’s adopted home base.
In media thinking, Vaynerchuk appears to suffer from déformation professionnelle [2], a concept that has been qualitatively and quantitatively proven to exist in media planning [3]. In every other area of his life (as far as we know), Vaynerchuk suffers very little. He’s a former wine critic, proven entrepreneur and now global media guru. His media celebrity is a product of the reality-TV and social media age, so it makes sense his theories about media are in that same direction.
Enjoy: Mark Ritson: Gary Vaynerchuk is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong about media
- Okay, only twice previously. Marketing Wilderness: People Are Not Brands, and Coyote’s LinkedIn company page: May, 2018 Update.
- The literal translation, occupational hazard, doesn’t explain déformation professionelle nearly well enough. Here’s Wikipedia’s version.
- Jonathan Dodd, Confessions of the AdMen, LinkedIn Pulse, February 18, 2017.
I have a ton of respect for Alex Bogusky, freshly-unretired Chief Creative Engineer at CP+B. He has a different, decidedly more reality-TV take on Gary Vaynerchuk: https://bit.ly/2Bj7h8d