The Battle for Attention – Gary Vee’s AIBC Eurasia Summit keynote address

The AIBC Eurasia Summit‘s keynote address simply did not disappoint. As the all so familiar figure of Gary Vee spritely took to the main stage towards the end of day 1 of the sensational Dubai summit. He spoke of the true key to unlocking the leverage essential to any business in the modern market. Attention.

Nobody here is going to accomplish their goals unless they are able to communicate their message and get someone to do something

He began his seminal address by getting technical and heavily emphasising on the great opportunity being completely overlooked in the contemporary market. That of the concept of under – priced attention. Detailing the great shift from the importance of the product of any business towards the now imperative element of creating demand.

Impassioned by his argument, Vee stressed the great importance and the lack of industry wide awareness towards gaining your intended audience’s attention, of creating a direct relationship with your audience, one that is not brokered by an affiliate, a referral or anyone else for that matter. “If you are unable to do it, someone else is going to do it and they’re going to charge you for it”. He communicated the difficulties of going through a middleman to drive your own business customer acquisition and the great vulnerabilities this will cause on the side who cannot generate and extract tangible results from attention.

There is a battle out there for attention

Vee then began to dissect the reasons for this scalable issue. Pinpointing the issues many organisations have with developing a clear, concise, and effective strategy. “The lack of commitment overall on making pictures and videos and the written word work on the 7 to 10 platforms that have the world’s attention, fascinates me”. He elaborated that social media has changed, in a very real way that has made it an impossibly ignorable, extremely powerful tool. He cited that we are living in the post “tiktokification” of social media, and this has and will continue awaking the world to the vital importance of attention in the professional community.

This shift in the actual methodology of harnessing social media has moved towards the exponential importance of content. Whereas previously being consistent, building a community to consume your content on a regular basis was the optimal strategy for harvesting attention. According to Vee, the new currency is very much content, the quality, and the quantity in equal parts is what will now drive attention and convert viewership.

Taking his points to a much larger scale, Vee then went on to emphasise the largest companies are currently pouring all their efforts into math. “There’s a lot of good math out there, what it’s not able to do (the marketplace as a whole) is art, art is different, art is not a scam, art is not black and white.” Mathematic strategies to drive impressions and viewership up, but not to truly engage them in the way art can. “Social media marketing confuses people because they think if they’re doing it they’re doing it well”.

The Opportunity of Attention

So few people have figured out how to play this matrix of attention properly

Vee then honed in on the massive opportunity the structure of this issue proposes. He urged the attendees of his keynote to mobilise their outlook on social media, he postulated 15 – 30 posts each and every single day, as an investment in brand currency and relevancy is the course of action that should be taken. This would drive a re-strategization of social media and marketing outputs. Emphasising how critically thinking about strategy, how to make it sustainable, scalable, over a long period of time and how to afford such a stringent method are all key points to focus on.

Quality was also a topic he spoke on, how creating truly engaging content comes from a place of outward facing care and a diligent ethic to be unselfishly creative. To give your audience what will bring them value and how this must never be misconstrued conversely.

In compliment to this point Vee acknowledged the great strides AI has been having as of late, “All of us have tasted real AI not fake AI and it’s really caught everyone’s attention”. This re affirmed his point about art and how high-quality videos, pictures and writing produced to engage and excite will become even more valuable due to these great advances.

A lot of the making of this stuff is going to become commoditised, But the thinking of the ideas, the setting up of critical thinking, of what you’re going to make to make people jump in is incredibly important

Curiosity and the concept of “Maybe”

Vee then migrated his speech to a different message, one concerning the incredible opportunities present by an event such as the AIBC Eurasia Summit. He targeted the idea of “curiosity”, and the concept of “maybe”. With all the emerging technologies coming into truly tangible fruition as of late, and with all the scalable, forward moving trajectory all these innovations are continuing to have, now can simply only be a time for curiosity. Come to grips with it all, be challengingly curious in all of the craziness and maximise it all. “In this next era there will be some of the biggest opportunities you’ve seen in your entire life”.

He continued to address risk in such a context. He questioned the scepticism, surrounding all the new and emerging creations taking shape, despite all the setbacks and big losses accrued by such entities in the blockchain such as the NFTs and the issues with smart contracts. Vee re-iterates that it doesn’t mean they won’t become a meaningful force in our world. Explaining how that in spite of the crashes that plagued the web 1.0 companies in the late 90s the internet has become perhaps the most important invention in human history. In this vein he urged his audience to fall in love with the concept of “maybe”.

If you meet that new genre, that new platform, that new technology with the concept of maybe you will have a much better chance to get what you want out of the world

He concluded his admirably generous keynote by emphasising this concept on a more fundamental level.

At a conference like this, the number 1 ROI, is not a keynote like this, it is not the booth, the number 1 ROI is the people sitting to the left and right, to the front and back of you that you’ve never met in your life