Predicting The Future, Dealing With Hate & Living In The Dirt - Gary Vaynerchuk - #777

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Gary Vaynerchuk. He's an entrepreneur, speaker and an author. Most people would like to increase their reach online to connect with people that they respect and have access to a bigger audience, which leaves two questions. Is this something you actually want? And if you do, how can you grow your platform in 2024? Expect to learn why attention is more valuable than ever, how to actually become relevant in 2024, what it takes to be authentically yourself in your personal life and online, what social platforms Gary is excited about over the next few years, how he deals with criticism, how to know when to monetise your following and much more. Gary is one of the OGs of this industry and love him or hate him, he has a very specific set of skills and those are building and continuing to grow online platforms. Today we get to find out some of his best tips. If you're someone who cares about your ability to reach online, I think that there's a lot to take away from this one. Also, we get some reflections about his internal states and personal story and reflections over the last two decades of kind of being a personality on the internet. It's very good and I hope that you take lots away from it. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Gary Vaynerchuk. What do you think most people don't understand about how attention works?

**Gary Vaynerchuk** (1:41)
Whew, how long are we in this? This could take the entire show. I think that there's many things. I think for the corporate marketer that's watching right now or listening, meaning someone that works at a company, right? Not like an advanced company. Let's call it the Fortune 50,000, not even 500 They don't realize that they're living in a academia boardroom environment on intention. They're trading on potential attention, not actualized attention, historic attention, not actualized attention. They're not day trading attention. They're buying attention of the past.
Even though I think deep down they know they're not buying it. Meaning, for simple terms for everyone, by the way, hi everyone. Thanks for having me on the show. The reason most companies still spend an ungodly amount of money on television, outdoor billboards, print ads, banner ads or pre-rolls or bad digital stuff is because their internal reports say there's attention there.
And so the way corporate works is based on boardroom and fake reports. So I think that whole set, what they don't understand is where the actual attention is, do I think they know? Do I think the 48 year old that works at Tesla or BMW or Mountain Dew, do I think they know? The 62 year old, do I think they know? I think they actually really know. But I think they also know that if they buy TikTok media, that that hasn't made its way into their media agency, conglomerate, their corporation, and it won't show up as ROAS positive, return on investment positive. So what, and I think because of that, they're not practitioners. When I went through COVID on Zoom with hundreds of CMOs, because now we had the opportunity to do that, I was not flabbergasted, but I was reminded how most of my great friends and contemporaries in corporate America marketing are so far away from being a practitioner of social media creative, of what's going on with micro influencers, of my belief that people like yourself are going to really disrupt CBG, because not only have you built organic audiences, not only do you know how to make actual content that people want to watch, but then even when you do advertising, you can outflank them because you understand that the first second of a video on a TikTok or Instagram matter, that the thumbnail matters, that the copy matters, the slang, the terminology, and more importantly, that you know that you'd rather spend your money on social, creative media or influencers over so many other behaviors they do. So that's where attention is completely misunderstood in private equity, venture capital, Wall Street, corporations, Fortune 5000, Madison Avenue. On the art world side, more than half of the people that are watching right now, emerging influencers, creators, entrepreneurs, hustlers, grinders, the ambitious. I don't think they understand that it's everything. And then thus, they're playing at a seven. Like the people that we all see in our feeds, our circles, the Austin, Miami, LA, New York, the crew. I think everyone's at a seven. Meaning they might have Instagram or TikTok down. They might be doing a podcast. They might be vlogging. They might know who the micro influencers are. They've watched me from the OG, OG days all the way through all the beasts and the Pauls and the D'Amelio's and the Nelk Boys and the U's and the, like, they've seen it all. But I don't think on a day-to-day, this is why I called it day training attention. I don't think, if I, when I look at the best, the people with millions of followers, I can see that they're still doing 16 months ago tactics, four months ago tactics, whether it's the thumbnail, the copy, the carousel. And definitely for the A players, why they're not A+, why they're B-, they don't fuck with LinkedIn enough. They don't, they either are YouTube shorts or TikTok or Spotlight Snap or Instagram, and they're not all. There are very few people on earth, and I'm proud to be one of them, that is actually doing day-to-day creative, organic social on all of them. And I mean all of them. And takes YouTube short nuances very seriously different than what ex-Twitter does. And so for the A-players, the B-players, the reason they're not A+, is they're not diversified enough against enough platforms. And they're not, once they hit, they start to get distracted about other things. Rightfully so, they expand. They start CPGs, they start going to Coachella and hooking up. They start doing, they start thinking about other things and it doesn't allow them, and every one of them knows it, right? Like think about the contemporary set. It's fun that Coachella just happened. Every one of them knows it, that when they were 16, 19, 23, 27, they were 24-7 obsessed with whatever they were obsessed with. And then when they start winning a little bit, they take a little of the pedal and they start smelling the roses and that's amazing. But it means that there's opportunity. And for a lot of them, they've plateaued, right? Four years ago, when I was yelling about TikTok, a lot of people wanted to stay in Instagram because they had a million followers there and it was good for their ego. And so they didn't want to start at zero on TikTok. And now what's happened is a lot of those influencers, creators, entrepreneurs are rushing to catch up. And what I wanted to do in this book is tell everybody like, attention is it? It's like working out. You're in great shape, clearly. Like, okay, you could do it well for four years, but if you take off for two years, like shit's gonna happen. And I just want people to stay on it. And so what I think that people misunderstand that attention is very detailed, like I just broke down two sets, there's many more, but it's very nuanced and detailed within.