About Gary Meyer
Gary Meyer.
A marketer who learned attention beats data.
Gary Meyer
Fractional CMO · Toronto
I used to be the data guy
For most of my twenty-year marketing career, I treated data like a religion. Numbers, research, hypotheses, testing. That's how I solved client problems, and it worked. For every dollar we spent, we generated multiples in results. Two times. Three times. Ten times. Our digital team of two beat teams ten times our size. One agency folded after we won its biggest client, which I still feel guilty about. "What we think doesn't matter," I'd say in pitches. "Only the data matters."
I was wrong. Very wrong.
Attention beats data
It took me a long time to learn that perfect targeting is useless if nobody pays attention. Attention isn't a data problem. It's a creative one. Big ideas earn attention. Emotion creates desire. Desire drives action. Data can validate the idea. It can't generate it. I wrote a longer piece on this →
I built a framework for it
Attention beats data is an opinion. Attention Theory turns that opinion into something you can use.
Attention passes through three gates. Trigger is the involuntary capture, roughly 300 milliseconds before you've decided anything. Tune asks, is this for me? Transfix is where memory forms and decisions get made. Five drivers decide what passes each gate: emotional salience, social relevance, novelty and surprise, goal alignment, and cognitive spotlighting. The whole thing sits on one spectrum from reflex to decision.
I built it because I needed it. You can read it at theoryofattention.com or use the free Claude Code skill to apply it with an AI agent.
What I've built
After I exited my agency, I built four ventures from Toronto around the same idea: attention is the real engine of business. They now run largely on their own, so I have room for fractional, consulting, and leadership work with other teams.
Attention Strategy is a senior marketing consultancy. The headline says it: attention isn't about being loud. We have offices in Toronto, Ottawa, Rome, and Cape Town.
Media Audit Group runs 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 where the money went. Toronto, London, Johannesburg.
Property Bounty is a demand-led real estate marketplace. Investors post a cash bounty for the deal they want, and local bounty hunters find matching properties on and off market. You only pay when a deal closes. The belief is simple: demand, not supply, is the signal worth organising around.
Did They Ghost You? is an independent, moderated record of what happens after job interviews. It makes hiring communication more visible while giving credit to companies that keep candidates informed.
The receipts
Before that, I founded a digital agency in Johannesburg called Condriac. I grew it to 30 people across three cities, reached ZAR 20M in annual turnover, and exited in 2019. I cut cost per lead by 90% for TATA Motors while holding sales targets. I rebuilt Virgin Atlantic's lead-generation campaigns, and the Johannesburg–London route became the most profitable in EMEA. I won South African Tourism's $6M global account, the largest regional new-business win that year. I also saved a global non-profit more than $1M in advertising spend, and the work won a global digital marketing award.
Those numbers matter because they're the foundation under everything I write here. Opinions are cheap. Opinions tested against real budgets and hard targets are worth more.
Working together
I'm available for fractional and consulting work: fractional CMO/VP roles, attention and media audits, workshops, and advisory. I'm also open to the right full-time leadership role. If your marketing team needs to think clearly and build in the AI era, that's the work I want to do. Get in touch →
What this site is for
I write for marketers, operators, and builders who suspect the data-first religion has clipped a lot of wings. AI is rearranging the work faster than most of us are ready for. The people who'll still be useful five years from now will know how to think and build.
I'll be wrong about plenty of it. That's the deal.