How VaynerX Built a Creative Engine for Nearly 2,000 People Moving at the Speed of Culture

It’s 2pm on a Tuesday, and a new social media ad concept is taking shape at VaynerX. Instead of losing iterations in the shuffle, the team uses ClickUp to power the back-and-forth work: recording the initial idea, tracking versions for various platforms, and consolidating internal reviews.

Once internal feedback is resolved, the concept moves automatically to a client-specific workspace. The client gets a notification, clicks in, watches the video, and drops a timestamp comment right at the four-second mark. Feedback is back before the creative director has her next coffee.

No deck. No meeting. No version confusion. No waiting.

VaynerX is the holding company founded by Gary Vaynerchuk, built on a simple belief: brands need to move at the speed of culture. Nearly 2,000 people power that output.

Mika Nagashima oversees how it all connects. As SVP of Connected Systems, she's responsible for the platform layer underneath every piece of work VaynerX produces: the work management system, the financial tools, the data layer, the reporting infrastructure. Four pillars, dozens of systems, and the connective tissue between them is her job.

She came in with a clear picture. One workspace. Creative and strategy on the same view. Clients sitting inside the work instead of outside it. Teams in New York, LA, and everywhere in between operating as a single org.

"Previously, it was more about tool governance rather than work collaboration," Mika says. "We wanted to take the tool to where our users are, rather than making them come to it."

She found it in ClickUp.

The most significant change may be the simplest to describe: clients are now inside the work.

When a concept clears internal review, automations moves it to a client-specific workspace where reviewers mark up video, leave timestamped feedback, and comment on assets in context. No file to download. No meeting to schedule. "The direct collaboration on the content is life-changing for us," Nagashima says.

For VaynerX, data governance is non-negotiable. The agency runs work for some of the world's most recognizable brands, and that work carries client information that must be strictly safeguarded — between brands, between teams, or out to the open web.

So the controls are watertight. Spaces are private by default. Public links are disabled at the admin level. Client lists are audited, member access is reviewed, and AI agents access only what permissions allow. Nothing crosses a boundary it isn't supposed to cross.

VaynerX makes social-first creative for some of the biggest brands in the world — the kind that has to land the same week it's briefed. ClickUp supports the agency on their journey.

Creative, media, strategy, legal, finance, people ops, and clients now share one platform and one set of workflows. The brief, the brainstorm, the asset, the feedback, the performance data. Nothing leaves the room.

What Mika has spent the last several months building with ClickUp is a clearer line of sight — from the first brainstorm to the final performance number — across the entire creative operation. For a company that runs on speed, that kind of visibility is the difference between guessing and knowing.