Culture moves fast—your marketing should, too

Nataly Kelly (00:00):

Welcome to Inside Insight, where marketing strategy meets consumer truth with your host, Nataly Kelly.

Nataly Kelly (00:05):

80% of consumers now rely on zero click AI results for nearly half their searches, cutting organic web traffic by as much as 25%. That's a seismic shift. Search isn't about clicks anymore. It's about answers, instant AI-driven answers for marketers. It's about meeting consumers where they are and showing up consistently across every touch point.

Nataly Kelly (00:28):

It's also about spotting where attention is moving, catching up to the latest trends while anticipating the next wave before it peaks. I'm joined today by an agency leader whose team specializes in exactly that. Avery Akkineni is the Chief Marketing Officer at VaynerX, a family of companies building brands for the now. Today we'll discuss how brands can navigate the new era of search and how marketing and insights teams can identify and capitalize on emerging channels to stay ahead. Hi Avery, welcome to Inside Insights.

Avery Akkineni (01:03):

I'm excited to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Nataly. It is such a pleasure to be here. Big fan of you, big fan of your books and now this podcast. So it's really my honor.

Nataly Kelly (01:14):

Oh, it's my honor to have you here. I've learned so much from you and your team working with you, so I'd love to have you introduce yourself. Can you start by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Avery Akkineni (01:23):

Absolutely. I'm Avery, originally from Nashville, Tennessee, and my career journey has taken me across the world from California to New York to Singapore to now Miami. I am currently serving as the Chief Marketing Officer at VaynerX, a family of companies building brands for the now, which includes the flagship agency VaynerMedia. It's been an absolute delight to be at Vayner working alongside our incredible founder, Gary Vee. Over the past almost nine years. I started my career at Google, so your comments on search are super apartment and it's an incredible time and as a former Googler, I think about search and this evolution all the time. So I started my career at Google, then joined Vayner and served on both our media team, launched our offices in Asia, launched our innovation group, and now I get to be in the middle of everything as the CMO and office leader for Miami.

Nataly Kelly (02:08):

Wow, that is such great experience and it's so relevant for the topic that we're discussing today, which I'm so excited to have you here for. So search is really changing for the first time in about 20 years with AI and with all the things you just mentioned. So I'd love to find out a little more from you about how marketers should think about where to focus—traditional SEO, answer engine optimization, or generative optimization. What should we even be calling this?

Avery Akkineni (02:34):

Yeah, I, I mean different people call it different things. At Vayner, we're using the term GEO a lot, but different clients will refer to it in different ways. I think our focus and where we're guiding client partners right now is to focus on content creation. Because in a world where some people are using ChatGPT, some people are using Gemini, some are using Perplexity, some are still using Google, which of course is still growing—Google search is still growing across the globe. People are searching in different ways, but they're still searching, searching. More fundamentally, our belief is the best thing that a brand can do is create their own content.

Avery Akkineni (03:10):

That is answering consumer needs and educating consumers on what they do and how they can improve consumers' lives.

Nataly Kelly (03:17):

Yes, it's so interesting that you say that because I remember that I learned a few years ago in Google search that 80% of the search queries were topics and phrases that Google had never seen before. And now what we're seeing with answer engine optimization is these, call them long tail search keywords, they're actually like prompts and variations of the prompts. And the conversation is evolving to longer and longer threads, which is so interesting to see how these two areas are connecting.

Nataly Kelly (03:40):

So I'd love to know if you have any thoughts on that.

Avery Akkineni (03:44):

Yeah, I think now, you know, people, when people first started using search, they would search for like very basic terms. Gary often gives the example of he owned the keyword "wine" for a year and a half for 5 cents a click. Because when you were first learning how to use search, you search like very basic things like sneakers, wine, coffee, like vacation in Hawaii. And now people are searching in a much more descriptive manner.

Avery Akkineni (04:07):

They're giving a lot more context. Over time, people evolve the way they search. They're not just searching for wine, they're searching for white Burgundy, they're searching for white Burgundy from 1998. They're searching for this specific vineyard. People know what they want a bit more in Google or whichever answer engine is helping them find that.

Avery Akkineni (04:26):

And with generative AI and people getting comfortable giving so much context, they're like, I'm looking for a delicious wine that's under $18 that I can get in Miami, Florida that would pair well with my lobster salad I'm making—giving like a lot more context than just "wine." Right. And that's really interesting for brands because you need to create different answers to that. You can't just say that we're a liquor store.

Avery Akkineni (04:50):

You have to say, this is what we provide. This is why it's great. This is what it pairs with. This is how much it costs, basically giving a lot more context for the engines to crawl and serve up. Your suggestion?

Nataly Kelly (05:05):

Yes, that's such a great point because it's adding to the capabilities that marketers have of personalization, potentially, because there's all this capture happening as you described for the specifics around, like my use case, my preferences, my favorite wine paired with this meal, with this show—all these things that go hand in hand. And it's really interesting to see how that's unfolding, particularly with the impact on pay per click. And now with answer engine optimization playing into that, it's like, would you like me to generate five examples of that for you? And I'm like, sure. And then it gives me all the links and I can click right there.

Nataly Kelly (05:37):

And it's really interesting to see how that's evolving. And I think it may relate to the topic that I've heard you talk about quite a lot and Gary and Vayner in general on this idea of finding underpriced attention before it becomes mainstream. So I'd love to know from you, how do you spot those early signals of where consumers are spending their time before brands catch on?

Avery Akkineni (05:58):

Yeah, I think this is really in our DNA. At Vayner, we refer to it as day trading attention—understanding where consumers are spending their time.

Avery Akkineni (06:06):

Really basic stuff like we check the App Store every single day. What are the top apps? Okay, is there a new app that popped in here? Because that's a signal that a lot of people are downloading this thing. And if it's a new one, that means let's try it out.

Avery Akkineni (06:20):

Let's understand if there are advertising opportunities, content creation opportunities, staying on top of things like that. That's how we spot underpriced attention. And I would say it's an art and a science. I just described the science part of it of tracking top places people are spending time on free available tools. Marketers who are listening to this, you do not need a zillion expensive third party martech tools to tell you this. Everyone has access to the App Store and that's a great way to know where people are paying attention. And then there's the art side of it, which is hearing this emerging rapper or seeing this emerging tennis star and you're like, wow, there's something about this person that is capturing outsized attention. This, you know, they're standing out, they're driving fandom, they're going viral. Why?

Avery Akkineni (07:03):

And that's something we spend a lot of time on, is developing relationships with those stars on the rise so that we can help our partners get the best possible value, get them when they're on that underpriced attention curve versus when everybody realizes it and everything is kind of caught up. But I want to sort of build on the search point because a well-known proxy in the world of brand building is the follow-on effects from brand building brand campaigns to turning into search. So in our wine example, let's just say you are a white Burgundy manufacturer. If you are creating demand for white Burgundy, that is your best possible way to capture it. If you are telling the world that they need to try your white Burgundy and maybe they're having it on the summer, I think I'm pretty.

Avery Akkineni (07:41):

And there's a lot of content around how this is the best wine of the summer. Then you can get people to search for what you are selling them. And I think about that all the time because that demand can be created through brand building. And that's a well-known strategic lever to drive brand growth. In many brands that we work with, organic search volume is a proxy for brand health.

Avery Akkineni (08:02):

And how many net new users we're bringing in on brand terms and category terms is important because you have to educate consumers on what they need. So they're searching, hey, I have to go get that duo bag, for example, if you're Kate Spade.

Nataly Kelly (08:16):

Yes, that's so, so true. And the example you gave is a great one because it's setting the trends, not just following the trends. And that relates, you know, that's how you spot those early signals that you create those early signals to enable your brand to really connect with consumers and be ahead of that trend. If you're the one creating it, it's so smart. You know, it's great that you say you don't need to have a lot of fancy tools to track this either. It is art and science. Of course, you want to look at the data.

Nataly Kelly (08:42):

But what occurs to me hearing you give those examples is it's also about knowing how those trends relate to your brand and what's distinctive about your brand and which attributes you want to be associated with and finding those moments too. Because just because something is trending doesn't mean it's perfect for the brand. And a lot of, a lot of organizations still struggle to define that and like really make sure that they are connecting what's special about their brand and unique to the trends. You know, that's why it comes off as so inauthentic when people try to do it unnaturally.

Avery Akkineni (09:13):

That's so right. I hate the term trend jacking because I think people think that you're just, you know, grasping for relevance and hanging on to anything that might make sense. And if you're a wine brand, it might make sense for you to create an association with the "summer I turned pretty." If you're a B2B software, maybe it doesn't, you know, and that's okay. Not everything has to be linked to trending moments.

Avery Akkineni (09:34):

Um, understanding how your brand shows up and understanding how consumers want to engage with you is part of that art.

Nataly Kelly (09:41):

Yes, absolutely. Wow. Well, that's fantastic and actually really fascinating and leads me to my next question, which is, you know, we're seeing everything from TikTok shop to click to buy moments on streaming platforms now, and I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how you think live shopping will reshape discovery and brand building.

Avery Akkineni (10:01):

I'm so glad you brought this up. You know, live shopping is near and dear to our hearts at Vayner. We've—and when I think back to my experience in live shopping, it actually started in 2019 when we were running live shopping campaigns for our brands in Asia. And those were a little bit like Cinderella shopping. So late night shopping is a really common behavior in China. And oftentimes with the types of brands we work with, we were arranging celebrity appearances, like edutainment-type of things that would culminate in some type of a specialized promo.

Avery Akkineni (10:34):

And there's 9.9 and 10.10 and 11.11, which are big, like, shopping holidays that are popularized not only across China, but across really all of the Asia Pacific region. So we're doing a lot of campaigns for that. And that's when I first got a taste of this idea of, like, special, like, timed promotions, creating urgency and being linked to entertainment in a way that, like, had incredible commercial impact. The first time we ran one of these, my team was showing me the numbers and I was like, there has to be an extra zero here. That can't be true.

Avery Akkineni (11:07):

It was like we'd sold like a million products in like, 10 minutes. And I was like, no, no, that's, like, not possible. And they were like, yeah, it is. And then, you know, I better understood that Lee Jackie at the time could sell a million lipsticks in a minute just because of the scale—one of the Chinese market and second, how attractive these promotions are, especially when affiliated with a celebrity.

Avery Akkineni (11:28):

So that was my first, you know, foray into that. And we did that across different markets in Asia Pacific, across Southeast Asia, occasionally across Japan as well. And then I didn't think about it for a few years because it was so not there in the United States. And then, of course, Gary, who always has his finger on the pulse, wanted to turn our Twitch studio into a live shopping studio about two years ago to promote Veefriends, which is his IP brand, his sort of Pokemon, Sesame Street characters that have their own sort of world and have their own card collectibles and have their own memorabilia. And pretty quickly he leaned into this idea of creating a daily livestream that started happening across TikTok, across Whatnot, across Fanatics Live, and experimenting with places like Walmart Live and Amazon Live.

Avery Akkineni (12:17):

And we swiftly realized that we could move a lot more inventory in these timed bursts of edutainment, commerce, tainment, however you want to frame it, than we could through traditional promotions on the website. So that is a muscle that I think we really built on the Veefriends team. And it's been such a benefit, and that team is absolutely incredible. It's been such a benefit just having being in the same office and that osmosis, because then it empowered us to understand how to crack live shopping for the brands that we represent in the consumer electronics category, in the CPG category, in the fashion category, in the beauty category. And over the last couple of years, it's been a really fun journey to prove that this can work, not just for collectibles or beauty or consumer electronics, but really across any type of, you know, brand with a physical product, if you have the right premise, you have the right offer, you have the right education and the right entertainment on the right platform.

Avery Akkineni (13:13):

And each of the platforms I mentioned have their benefits. QVC is still a huge platform for this. We're actually hosting a live shopping summit on October 8th. You should absolutely join. We'll have the CEO of PacSun, of Mary Roots Organics, of Mac Cosmetics, and then also platform leaders from QVC and TikTok and Fanatics Live, each of which have different offerings.

Avery Akkineni (13:34):

And that I think is really important to understand as well. It's the platform and how people engage on that platform so that brands can create an experience that actually breaks through because you can make—you can have incredible commercial success, but like anything, it's not easy. You need to understand the formula and, you know, create content in a way that is entertaining. Is educating.

Avery Akkineni (13:58):

And that has the right commercial incentives to really drive success.

Nataly Kelly (14:02):

Wow. I love this example and what I love the most about it, I love a lot of things about it. It reminds me of why I love marketing. You know, it's, you know, that detective work and uncovering those patterns, but also the creativity to use those patterns to kind of catch, you know, set the trap and, you know, catch the, you know, catch the consumer and delight them, of course, along the way.

Nataly Kelly (14:23):

I don't mean to make it sound sinister, but you know, what I also love about it, Avery, is it really infuses something that you learned in a completely different culture and then were able to leverage in a different country. And it's a similar pattern. It just plays out slightly differently. And like you said, on different platforms, different channels, different combinations depending on the brand, what they're selling, the demographic, who they're targeting, like all those things. This is where marketing is beautiful and complex.

Nataly Kelly (14:52):

But I love hearing that example from you. It's absolutely just amazing. So I'm glad that you went and did all the work that you did in Asia Pacific with Vayner to bring that back. That's amazing. And Gary's input obviously steered it in that direction.

Nataly Kelly (15:07):

So I know that we both work with brands that have marketing and insights teams. Between Vayner and Zappy, we see this all the time—marketing and insights teams working together. But I'm really fascinated to get your take from the agency perspective of that relationship and how it works, because our experience is that creative agencies often get filtered insights from the brand teams. So I'd love to know what you think about that ecosystem, some ways you work to understand it, and how it could be improved.

Avery Akkineni (15:35):

Yeah, it's a great question. We are typically, as a creative agency, as a media agency, we're working with the marketing teams, the brand teams themselves. And sometimes they'll have a center of excellence that handles media and the... I think you're exactly right that the insights we get are filtered through their perspective. So there's all this incredible consumer insights work that's happening: of flavor development, of, you know, product development, of what people are wanting, like what they're loving, what they're not loving.

Avery Akkineni (16:03):

And I would almost call those, like, priorities, product insights or consumer insights more broadly. And a lot of times we focus on the marketing insights, like where do they spend their time, where do they consume their media, which is part of it. But from a creative perspective, the true consumer insights, like, should be shaping the message. Oftentimes people are human. You know, in large organizations there can be silos and different groups of who is the ultimate decision maker.

Avery Akkineni (16:31):

But in many cases, like, they work hand in hand and like we're getting that information directly from the consumer insights team or the focus groups themselves and that's feeding into our insights. But in just as many cases it is all coming through like a modified marketing brief where they take the pieces they like, they add their little spin to it and they of course try to like really get the agency briefed on like. And your objective is to drive sales of this product? Yeah. And what's I think really hard is sometimes as marketers we get attached to our ideas and our campaign concepts and our, you know, our favorite manifestations of what we want to convey.

Avery Akkineni (17:08):

And so even sometimes if the consumer feedback is the opposite, it's like, well, we've already storyboarded this, we've already invested time in it, we've already paid, you know, it's too far down the line to stop it. So therefore we are going to take those insights and just use the ones that we find relevant because we've already invested too much in it.

Nataly Kelly (17:28):

It's something about that real time access to the information. And I'm just curious if maybe you're seeing—because I know you and I both have talked about the fact that the pace is changing and it's accelerating and like you mentioned China. China is a market that moves very fast with high volume and the US market moves fast too.

Nataly Kelly (17:45):

But I was just curious if you're seeing that need for kind of more agile engagement and re-evaluating. Like the insights we had when we started to build this campaign might have changed by now. Just curious if you had any thought on that.

Avery Akkineni (17:59):

Yeah, I mean, I think that China is very unlike any market that I've worked in just because of the speed. And I think we as Americans think that we're fast.

Avery Akkineni (18:09):

But then you get to working on a campaign with a Chinese agency or production house and you're like, oh my goodness, like I didn't even know what speed was. So I think that their culture is innately super speedy. And that comes into everything from the pace of their media consumption, the pace of their shopping to media consumption, to also product innovation and testing out different things. I wouldn't say that's representative of anywhere else that I've worked, but the speed there is really second to none. Then I would say like, you know, there's sort of...

Avery Akkineni (18:38):

Americans are also—Asia Pacific also known to be fast in certain ways. Americans known to be fast. And then you get to, on our other side of things, like our friends in Europe or Latin America, where change takes a lot longer. Product development and launching new things is not as—like the rapid prototyping behavior that we see a lot in other parts of the world doesn't seem to resonate as well there, is my experience.

Avery Akkineni (19:04):

So it's—every market has its own nuances. And you would know this better than anyone, having just written a book about this.

Nataly Kelly (19:16):

Well, I'm always interested in the, you know, the lived experience that you have from, you know, working there. I haven't lived, you know, I've visited China, but haven't worked there.

Nataly Kelly (19:25):

I think you get a very different perspective when you're working there, working with Chinese agencies as you just described. I think it's really interesting. You know, one thing I have seen on that topic is that markets that are homogeneous, more homogeneous, like in, you know, in the United States, everybody does speak English, you know, many other languages too here, but it's largely monolingual. And, you know, there's a lot of people speaking the same language in China too. I do think in some markets you have a little more slowdown for various different reasons.

Nataly Kelly (19:53):

You know, it can be economic development, it can be linguistic, you know, diversity. It can be lots of different things factoring in there. But I think it's fascinating. And what I love about this for our listeners is, you know, pay attention to brands that are really good in China because you can probably learn a lot from them, you know, and you can probably learn a ton from those strategies.

Avery Akkineni (20:17):

So I totally agree. And I think there's also like, some companies are doing this already, like testing different products in China first and then sometimes bringing them to the United States. We see like export culture being so common. And another market where I'm seeing this a lot right now is actually Korea. Things that are trending right now in South Korea are now coming to the United States with K Pop and Demon Hunters and all of that.

Avery Akkineni (20:41):

There's such a focus on Korean skincare.

Nataly Kelly (20:43):

Yeah, actually. Mm. Oh, that's—that's so true.

Nataly Kelly (20:47):

It's like the connectedness just keeps growing and we can learn from each other faster. But it also increases the challenge and the fun of working in marketing and insights. So I know that you, you've talked about at Vayner in the past about feeding back consumer comments, shares and reactions, and I'd love to hear what you think about how that can change the way campaigns evolve after launch. Do you mind sharing a little bit about that?

Avery Akkineni (21:10):

Yeah. I mean, our philosophy at Vayner is that no piece of creative should get a dollar of paid media until it has been validated with performance. And for us, we believe organic social is such a great testing ground. There's obviously incredible platforms like Zappy that help with that. But we believe that in this day and age, there is nothing that should be getting paid media until we've proved that that piece of creative is effective. And that is like really our core belief.

Avery Akkineni (21:38):

We believe that everyone is trained in this old school way of thinking that might have been influenced by a big 1991 marketing book, that the world has changed since 1991 in the paid, owned, earned framework is, has been replaced and the funnel has flipped with an owned first, then earned, then paid perspectives. Because you can actually put your money on something that, you know, works because of all the incredible testing tools at our fingertips.

Nataly Kelly (22:05):

Yeah. And I think that's so powerful because it enables brands to really find themselves first and lean into that first as opposed to doing that second or third. And I think it also is related to when markets are more competitive and crowded.

Nataly Kelly (22:18):

You have to do that to stand out. You know, you have to, you know, differentiate and be more authentic. So it's really, really interesting. Okay, Avery, now I want to move into our lightning round of questions where I'm going to ask you a few quick hitting customer insights related questions. Are you ready?

Avery Akkineni (22:37):

Yes.

Nataly Kelly (22:39):

Great. Okay, so what's one channel—new or existing—that you would double down on today?

Avery Akkineni (22:43):

Live shopping.

Nataly Kelly (22:45):

Ah, awesome. What is the most surprising signal you've seen recently that turned into underpriced attention?

Avery Akkineni (22:52):

This is a good question. Best signal that I've seen recently that turned into underpriced attention. I'm going to give one that happened this week. We started to see all of those skinny little banners popping up across Instagram and I think we saw like one, there was like one trending post. We launched one for Gary, and then subsequently within 24 hours we'd had 15 different brands within the Vayner family launch those types of skinny little assets because the Instagram algorithm was essentially prioritizing those for a certain moment.

Avery Akkineni (23:22):

This is the date of is September 25, 2025. This is the hottest format that every brand is trying right now because there's a little Instagram putting their finger on the scale of make those assets like way outperforming. So if you have something that you want to say, it could be funny, it could be product oriented. I saw brands do in so many clever different ways. This skinny little banner format on Instagram was way outperforming.

Nataly Kelly (23:47):

Wow, that is such an interesting insight and I hope that people hear this and take advantage of it while it's still hot. Who knows how long it will be? But that's a great example. Another lightning round question for you.

Nataly Kelly (23:59):

One thing agencies must master to stay ahead in a post search, post creative world. What would that be?

Avery Akkineni (24:04):

Day trading attention. Understanding where people's attention is shifting.

Avery Akkineni (24:09):

If it's shifting away from traditional search, where is it shifting? If it's searching to AI, where is it shifting to AI? Just that building that muscle of always thinking ahead. Like social media could be gone tomorrow and VaynerMedia would be just fine because we'd be like, where are people going next?

Nataly Kelly (24:25):

Wow, that's great.

Nataly Kelly (24:27):

That's great. Beyond TikTok shop, what's the next frontier for live or social commerce?

Avery Akkineni (24:33):

I think Whatnot is really interesting. It is something that's very popular in the card collecting collectibles community. Like sneaker heads love it.

Avery Akkineni (24:41):

But I've started to see some brands succeed on Whatnot. A watch brand called Invicta I've seen popping up and doing some really cool work there. So I think Whatnot's interesting. Amazon Live and Walmart Live are both introducing this format to what they offer—both to brands from a media perspective and to influencers from a talent perspective.

Avery Akkineni (24:58):

We'll actually at the Live shopping summit have Jack's Dining Room who does a lot of these on Amazon Live joining us and talking about how he's using that to build his brand and drive sales.

Nataly Kelly (25:09):

Wow, that's fantastic. I love the direct link to sales in all of this live shopping trend. So what's the fastest turnaround you've seen from cultural signal to campaign?

Avery Akkineni (25:19):

Oh my goodness, I think brands are have gotten like really speedy of hopping on a cultural moment and doing something. One that stands out to me that Vayner had nothing to do with but I absolutely loved earlier this year was the Bear was like the hottest show on TV and Carmine and like his his iconic white T shirt and everyone thinking he was the best looking guy and Calvin Klein did something awesome with him that was like an underwear sort of piece that was showing him in his Calvins and the white T shirt and then Away suitcase did a similar thing where they were instead of having the actor they actually had just their suitcase in the same thing. I thought that was super funny. So I brands who can take that like moment to connect immediately.

Nataly Kelly (26:00):

Wow, I didn't see the Away one. That—I must look that up. Really well done. We had nothing to do with it, but I loved it. It was a great reference. It's a great example.

Nataly Kelly (26:09):

Okay, well, that wraps up this episode of the Inside Insights Podcast. Thanks to Avery Akkineni, CMO at VaynerX, for joining us. I really appreciate the conversation. Had so much fun with you, Avery. If you would like to contact Avery, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or at insideinsightspod.com or you can visit her company website at vaynerx.com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a regular stream of research and insights knowledge in your podcast feed, hit that subscribe button in your podcast app or follow us on YouTube.