VaynerX Launches SMASH, a Social-First Engine Built for Brands

VaynerX has introduced a new social-first proprietary partnership offering, SMASH, designed to deliver a high volume of content and views for brands’ biggest moments. SMASH is a standalone, on-demand social-creative product engine, deploying premium, platform-native creative and promising to solve some of marketers' biggest challenges.

For modern brands wanting to stay relevant, VaynerX's chief business officer, Kaylen McNamara, says organic creative needs to be at the heart of their marketing.

The problem, however, is that many brands still struggle to sustain that volume day-to-day, particularly during their most critical brand and business moments – Kaylen cites new product launches, campaigns and sponsorship activations as examples. “SMASH exists to bridge that gap by enabling brands to generate high-performing social creative built on today’s best practices for both organic and paid social.”

She says SMASH will enable brands to earn “disproportionate views against their priorities.” The deliverables can include a combination of originally produced social media ads, as well as post-production work on existing assets the client may already have.

But how does SMASH differ from a traditional AOR relationship? Kaylen says the product is designed to complement it as well as in-house teams to enable brands to activate quickly at scale. This offering, says Kaylen, provides brands the speed, agility, volume and platform-native expertise required to win consumer attention.

When VaynerX is acting as the creative or social AOR, SMASH capabilities are typically embedded into the retainer. “Many of our current and potential SMASH clients, however, work with other creative partners or internal studios, and use SMASH to add scale and specialised execution where needed,” adds Kaylen. It can also be activated “above and beyond” an existing retainer for huge calendar moments like the Super Bowl, the World Cup, or new campaigns that weren’t previously scoped.

The offering boasts ‘platform-ready assets in days’. “We can move as fast as the clients can move,” says Kaylen. “Often, it’s about the focus of the brief and objective to then understand how quickly we can get the product into hands or give our team access to the physical location to shoot.” On VaynerX’s end, it’s about having a nimble team who can ideate and create in one place, rather than handing over to an external studio for production. “The creatives we deploy for SMASH are coming up with the social media ads’ concepts and then post-producing them within the same day.”

With SMASH, the main ambition is volume; teams will focus on the amount of social media ads they can provide, specifically creative that can actually generate views and impressions before the creative is amplified with media. “We’re bullish on putting paid media behind organic creative once the content is validated by consumers on social,” says Kaylen.

Naturally, with high-volume production, the risk is sacrificing impact. Historically the choice has been ‘either/or’ for clients, but Kaylen explains why this won’t be the case here. It begins by understanding how the platform actually works to ensure the creative gets scaled views. “This requires relevance… For most brands, it’s the day-to-day consumers that are building the brand faster than they can keep up.

“We work with clients to understand the guardrails of where we can’t go and then make each and every social media ad with a distinct purpose of who it is trying to reach and why. The days of hero assets and ‘fewer, bigger, better’ are over.” Brands, she asserts, need to be in the daily business of volume and variety through the lens of relevance.

While clients availing of the offering are, of course, confidential, Kaylen shares they’ve had strong success so far, even in very short windows.