About Gary Meyer
Gary Meyer.
A marketer who learned attention beats data.
Gary Meyer
Founder · Toronto
I used to be the data guy
For most of my twenty-year career in marketing, I argued for data the way a religious convert argues for their new faith. Numbers, logic, reason, analysis, research, hypotheses, testing — that's how I solved client problems. And it worked. For every dollar we spent, we generated multiples of that dollar in results. Two times. Three times. Ten times. Our digital team of two destroyed teams ten times our size. I remember with some guilt that one agency we worked with folded because we took their biggest client. Performance was my religion. "What we think doesn't matter," I'd say in pitches. "Only the data matters."
I was wrong. Very wrong.
Attention beats data
The lesson took me a long time to learn: even perfect targeting is useless if you can't get the target's attention. Attention isn't a data problem. Attention is a creative problem. Big, bold, imaginative ideas earn attention. Ideas evoke emotion. Emotion creates desire. Desire drives action. Data, used well, validates the idea. It doesn't generate it. I wrote a longer piece on this →
I built a framework for it
Attention beats data is an opinion. Attention Theory is what happens when you try to turn the opinion into something operable.
Every act of attention passes three gates. Trigger — the involuntary capture, in roughly 300 milliseconds, before you've decided anything at all. Tune — the silent question of is this for me? Transfix — the sustained state where memory forms and decisions get made. Five drivers decide what passes which gate: emotional salience, social relevance, novelty and surprise, goal alignment, cognitive spotlighting. It all sits on one continuous spectrum from reflex to decision.
I built it because I needed it. It's at theoryofattention.com. The operational version — a free Claude Code skill that lets any AI agent apply the framework — is on GitHub.
What I'm building now
I left agency life two years ago. Since then I've started three companies, all out of Toronto, all built on the same idea — that attention is the real engine of business.
Attention Strategy is a senior-level marketing consultancy. The headline says it: attention isn't about being loud. Offices in Toronto, Ottawa, Rome, and Cape Town.
Media Audit Group does independent, finance-grade paid media audits — we trace every dollar from plan to invoice to platform, for CFOs and procurement leaders who want to know what their marketing teams actually spent the money on. Toronto, London, Johannesburg.
Property Bounty is the most different of the three. It's a demand-led real estate marketplace: investors post a cash bounty describing the deal they want, and a network of local bounty hunters sources matching properties on and off market. You only pay when a deal closes. Same operating belief — that demand, not supply, is the signal worth organising the market around.
The receipts
Before any of those, I founded a digital agency in Johannesburg called Condriac, grew it to 30 staff across three cities and ZAR 20M in annual turnover, and exited in 2019. I dropped cost-per-lead by 90% for TATA Motors while holding sales targets. I rebuilt Virgin Atlantic's lead-generation campaigns and watched the Johannesburg–London route become the most profitable in EMEA. I won South African Tourism's $6M global account — the largest regional new-business win that year. I saved a global non-profit more than $1M in advertising spend, and the work picked up a global digital marketing award.
I lead with those numbers because they're the foundation under everything I write here. Opinions are cheap. Opinions tested against real budgets and real targets are worth reading.
What this site is for
I write here for the marketers, operators, and builders who suspect what I learned the hard way: that the data-first religion has clipped a lot of wings, that AI is rearranging the work faster than most of us are ready for, and that the people who'll be useful five years from now are the ones who can both think and ship.
I'll be wrong about plenty of it. That's the deal.