• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 20, 2023

CANNES -- Gary Vaynerchuk began his "Everything Is Different, Nothing Has Changed" keynote here this morning by dissing this year's festival's focus on AI, but thanks to some AI-assisted transcription, I easily turned around a simple word count analysis (see below) putting some dimensions around the keywords he used.

Mostly it was about "creative," which seems appropriate for a speech at a conference branded as the Festival of Creativity.

Secondly, it was a bout "me," and by that, I mean him.

I began analyzing his word use, because as a veteran of previous Vaynerchuk speeches, I was curious how many times he actually used the f-word. Turns out it ranked third, which tied with "social media," the thing that seemed to be the focus of the Vaynerchuk Media founder message, though he also touted television -- especially the Super Bowl -- as being media the ad industry should be focused on.

Not AI.

"If I hear one more f**king person say, 'AI' this week, I'm going to punch them in their f**king face," Vaynerchuk began his keynote, which followed two back-to-back sessions featuring some of the industry's highest profile execs waxing enthusiastically about the current and future promise of AI for transforming the ad business.

That said, it's worth noting that Vaynerchuk's audience cheered and applauded his remark.

"Because we're obsessed with AI -- because I sure know you all know what I'm saying -- and we will continue to debate and pontificate about 30-second commercials on TV. Yet the amount of conversation that will happen this entire week about social media creative, is almost going to be non-existent," Vaynerchuk said, getting to what possibly was the message he was actually trying to deliver.

"Meanwhile, in real life, outside of this f**king world, drillions of dollars are sold of products that are affected by the marketing that happens in social," he emphasized, adding, "The biggest brands in the world that visit here spend all their time thinking about tomorrow and yesterday, because they don't have the ability to know how to market today -- a.k.a. social media creative and media spend."

Say what you want about Gary Vaynerchuk, but he says what he feels, even if it's often about himself.

After regaling attendees about his coming-of-age, self-taught marketing acumen -- working his neighborhood lemonade stand, working in his father's liquor store -- he asked his father to stand up in the audience to take a bow.

He also asked the creatives in the room to stand up and take a bow as well.