This is a keynote that I gave in Singapore

that really struck.

There's a bunch of stuff in management and running

operations, a lot of my stuff is for early entrepreneurs.

I think for everybody who is running a business

with several employees or seven figures in revenue

are gonna get a lot out of this one.

So, I hope you enjoy it,

and I hope you like my sweater.

♪ We're unstoppable ♪

- I'm really excited to be here, thank you so much.

So, we have a lot of time together, which is amazing,

and so, I will take full advantage of that,

and to be very honest, I wanna get into the Q and A part

and start throwing this out to you guys to ask questions,

so I'm gonna try to get to that as quickly as possible,

because I think, for me, when I speak,

and what I think has allowed me to have a nice

speaking career is I'm obsessed with bringing in

as much value to the audience as possible.

My origin story of Belarus and lemonade stands

and baseball cards is something that you can see

on YouTube over and over and over again,

and as I continue through my career of speaking,

I wanna do less of that, and to be very frank,

the reason I wrote a book called AskGaryVee

is it's my great ambition to build enough brand

where I could come to an environment like this

and just go right into Q and A,

because at the end of the day,

I think that's where the biggest value

happens in a keynote, and so, what I'll do,

because I'm gonna assume some of you and many

of you may not know who I am.

I'll try to at least deliver on the promise

of giving a keynote, but please rest assured that

I'm ready to go into Q and A as soon as you guys are.

So, look, I think the thing that,

regardless if you're a B2B or B2C marketer,

regardless if you're starting on your first day

or you've got a $100 million company,

I think the thing that will really be important

for us to chat about first is

the thing that we're all connected by,

which is my obsession with attention.

Right, before you can tell me how great your product is

or how charismatic you are,

or why you're so right about what you have

to say to the world, whether as a person or as a business,

you have to get the person's attention to tell your story.

To me, this is the most fascinating thing

that's happening right now in our society,

is that attention has never been more

changing, has never been harder to grasp,

I think for a lot of us that have been in business

for a long time it's very difficult to grab the current

changing landscape of attention at the speed

of which it changes.

I spend eight, 10, 12, 15 hours a day

trying to audit and understand attention,

and even for me, there's so many things still happening

that I haven't been able to completely grab my hands on,

whether it's the depth of eSports,

arbitrage as a cultural phenomenon,

whether it's the blockchain,

whether it's all the opportunity within AI and ML,

whether it's the emerging AR infrastructure

in the Apple updates and Google infrastructure,

whether it's voice, which I speak a lot about right now,

on the Alexa, Google, and Apple fronts,

we're talking about a very different world

than our grandparents and parents grew up in

as businessmen and women, and more importantly,

as marketers and executors and most importantly,

as actual practitioners of the craft.

I think the thing that fascinates me the most

is how many people in here, I mean, to me,

when I think about how many of you flew to be here

or are here to see me speak,

we, including myself, we're so much further ahead

in understanding these things because of our interest in it,

regardless of your success at this point in it.

If you're sitting in this conference,

your intuition or curiosity or execution

around the modern day attention graph

and the opportunities within it is so much further

accelerated than the 99%,

and to me, that's super interesting to me,

that we have such an incredible opportunity in front

of us to trade on this opportunity,

and so, my question becomes,

how much of what you believe and know about this moment

is around you reading or consuming content,

and how much of it is that you're

actually executing within it?

If I can do anything to start this keynote off with,

if I can lead with anything,

if I can impact you in any shape or form

to have one action item,

it would be for you to start doing more of the thing.

Let me explain.

There's a lot of people in this room who understand

the concept of KOLs or Facebook ads,

but yet, I don't think enough are actually

executing within those environments.

You know, it's unbelievable how many of you have opinions

on these ad products and platforms,

yet aren't spending and executing yourself.

I think the thing that I spend so much time on

is I produce content and do social media,

because I wanna stay a practitioner.

I think of it as being a mason or a carpenter

versus being an architect.

If you look at that industry,

a lot of architects grow up getting their hands dirty,

and over time, they get separated too much from the work,

where they lose a pulse on the reality

of the current infrastructure.

I'm fascinated by that.

That is the thing that I try to stay grounded in.

If I can get everybody here to make one more ad,

to create one more piece of content,

to A/B test six different headlines on the same picture

in a Facebook, Instagram, WeChat environment.

These are very important variables that

not enough of us are talking about.

And so, at the most high level,

I would hope to inspire people to become practitioners

instead of pontificators in the craft of the opportunity.

There is only one reason I stand up here at this keynote

and have people wanna hear what I have to say.

It's because no matter what has been happening to me,

I've not lost my pulse on the craft of what I do.

How many people here have been following me

for longer than

a year?

So, one more time, hands, I just wanna see.

Great, almost all of you.

Most of you, 60, 70% of you.

I'm a simple dude.

I basically only believe in 10 or 12 things,

and I pump out an obnoxious amount of content,

which means that over the course of a year,

you're gonna pretty much grasp what my pillars are.

I think the only thing that allows me

the luxury of keeping your attention over the long haul

is my ability to stay relevant

to where the opportunities are.

The only reason after a year or two

that it's worth your time to give to me versus

something else, it's because I've had a good career

for 20 years of having enough intuition

on what consumers are gonna do, but way more importantly,

I don't talk about Alexa skills and briefings,

I make an Alexa skill and briefing

so that I understand it,

and I would tell you, there's a huge lesson in that.

I think a lot of people,

especially if they get a level of success,

start getting too far away from the craft,

and you start building around the raising the capital,

the exiting of the company, the writing of the book,

you know, the speaking on the keynote,

you just get away from the work,

and I would argue that it's never been more important

to stay on top of the work,

because every day it's changing, right?

To me, I'm running late this morning to our first meetings,

and I quickly go on Instagram Live

because they just created a new update

where it allows you to bring people into your

Livestream that are watching you,

and I did not feel comfortable being here today

without trying and tasting it and understanding

the functionality in case one of you asked

me a question about it.

I mean, it's an important insight.

It's an important insight,

and it is the absolute opportunity,

because when you think about the way I think about it,

I talk about day trading attention,

and when you talk about day trading attention,

I'm not a Wall Street guy, I'm not a capitals guy,

but I understand the difference between

day trading and putting something into a mutual fund

and watching it grow, right?

There's a very different speed,

there's a very different understanding,

and that's how I think about it.

My sign now says day trading attention.

A year ago it used to say marketing

in the year that we live in.

Why did I change it from marketing in the year

that we live in to day trading attention,

it was because I realized, oh my God,

everything we're about to talk about

is happening even faster,

that even if you believe in something for that year,

within that year, it's changing too much,

influencer marketing, and Facebook, and YouTube,

and Twitter, and LINE, and WeChat,

this stuff is changing too fast

and we are not keeping up with the subtle features,

because if you really understand this,

you know, you look at something like Instagram Stories

or Facebook Watch or all these subtleties,

in those little sub-arbitrages, polling,

in an Instagram, in those little features,

in those little updates are oftentimes the marginal

opportunity that is the biggest difference between

growing your business and not.

And so, it's exhausting and it's difficult,

but I have one very important statement around this

for everybody, tough luck.

You know, no matter how we want it, listen,

I wish that we never evolved from email.

In 1996, I had 90% open rates on my email newsletter.

I was crushing it, life was good.

I had figured out email.

Then in the early 2000s, I figured out Google AdWords.

I wish that never changed, I figured it out.

I won on that, then YouTube came out.

I had one of the first long form shows on YouTube in 2006.

I figured it out.

I liked it, I wish Twitter didn't come along, but it did,

and then I spent 15 hours a day tweeting all of you,

and then I grew into one of the most followed people

on Twitter, and then Facebook evolved.

And, like, Instagram came up, and Snapchat came.

Like, this is a never ending game of attention,

distribution, and arbitrage,

and so I think the biggest thing you need to understand is

the best product will always win if people know about it.

Right, and so, I think the thing that I spend

a lot of time on is I'm a marketer, I like to market,

I understand marketing, I'm a business builder,

I've built businesses.

I think there's an incredible, interesting,

kind of graph between the quality of your product

and how many people know about it.

So, for example, if you're a great marketer,

and you listen to everything that I say,

and you get a lot of attention,

and your business isn't working,

a lot of times it happens to do with your products sucking.