Marketing, attention, and culture: Gary Vaynerchuk on building in 2024

Executive overview

Most brands waste their marketing budget not from choosing the wrong platforms, but from ignoring context and defaulting to self-promotion. Attention is finite; the creative and its fit to the platform determine whether it converts.

The platforms are just distribution — the content and its context are the variable.

Day trading attention

• Each platform has its own psychology of time, audience, and format — content must be built for that context, not repurposed across channels.
• LinkedIn is currently underpriced for organic reach, comparable to Facebook in 2015 — most brands ignore it.
• Pop culture is a high-leverage, underused attention asset available to any business, not just those with celebrity budgets.
• Most brands post repetitively and selfishly ("look at me, buy from me") — that's why content fails.
• Winning the room before the conversation starts requires understanding who sees your content, when, and in what mindset.
• An asphalt business in Wisconsin grew from $800K to $2.5M in revenue after making a few TikToks — context beats category.

The creative is the variable

• The thumbnail, the first three seconds, the format, the slang — all must match the platform and the moment.
• Content posted on LinkedIn at 3:30pm on a Monday reaches people at work; that audience needs different framing than a weekend scroll.
• Florists, lawyers, and B2B businesses all have more permission to be playful and contextual than they allow themselves.
• Reverse-engineering audience psychology — not just choosing a channel — is where most marketers fall short.

VeeFriends: building IP with intent

• VeeFriends launched via NFTs but was always intended as a long-term intellectual property, not a crypto play.
• The goal: "Sesame Street meets Pokemon" — characters that teach emotional values like patience, accountability, and resilience.
• Characters like Patient Panda and Accountable Aunt are designed to deliver lessons Gary can't reach at scale through his personal brand alone.
• Fraggle Rock's brief was "stop war" — Jim Henson's intentionality is the model.
• Over-coddling has reduced self-esteem in young people; VeeFriends characters are designed to restore comfort with winning, losing, and feeling.

Culture and remote work at VaynerMedia

• Building culture remotely is very hard; office osmosis — learning by proximity to senior people — is difficult to replicate virtually.
• Gary personally signs off on every firing across VaynerMedia to prevent political or non-human decisions from managers.
• 20% of proposed firings are reversed on review.
• No firm remote policy has been set; the approach is case-by-case based on individual performance and wellbeing.
• Employees near the office who feel disconnected are gently pushed to come in; those with family constraints are encouraged to protect that time.
• The underlying principle is "purple" — rejecting binary, ideological positions in favor of balance and accountability.