Gary Vaynerchuk built his name telling CMOs they were wrong. Now he’s telling their CFOs instead

Gary Vaynerchuk built his empire selling to CMOs. Now he says CFOs get it faster.

For 15 years, VaynerMedia has been in the business of convincing marketing leaders to move budget, shift strategy and bet on platforms their organizations weren’t ready for. So it’s worth paying attention when he says, almost as an aside, that CFOs are now his most receptive room.

“By far the people that believe in what we’re doing are CFOs more than CMOs,” he said at the inaugural Modern Marketing Leaders Summit 2026 event his company hosted in London on Monday (Feb. 23). “It’s not even close. There’s literally no CFO meeting that I don’t have where, within the first 45 minutes, she or he’s like ‘OK, yes, this’.”

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For the idealists out there, it’s the fulfillment of Adam Smith’s centuries-old vision of the “invisible hand” of the market, although, amid the shock of the new, there’s an even older adage: “money talks.”  

It’s likely that your social media feed reads like that of the typical Digiday-staffer, with musings on the importance of agentic technology standards, such as “Should I back Ad Context Protocol or some other standard?” 

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