He also has great taste (and advice) on wine.
I follow Gary on Twitter and often check out what he's doing in other corners of the web, like this gem I stumbled across on Medium last week.
In the article, Gary discusses a growing trend in video content towards short-form content being produced by big media outlets, such as HBO. The content creation strategy corresponds with online trends and general catering to an ever-shrinking attention span.
But Gary offers a unique perspective which gave me a few takeaways.
Strong Brands Drive Value in Any Form
Gary uses HBO's signing of Jon Stewart to produce new short-form content as his primary example in the article. Jon experienced tremendous success in his long run on The Daily Show on Comedy Central and created a brand around himself of a certain type of humor and wit that resonated with his audience.
Because of the strength of his brand, Jon can attract a certain audience with just about any content creation strategy. Much like his protege. Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart can change formats and channels and still attract a following.
The key concept here is that when the brand has enough strength, it can carry over to different formats, and the content could be long or short form.
Quality First
In urging companies to buck the trend and pursue immensely epic long-form video content, Gary stresses the idea of creating quality long form content.
The key is in the quality.
Whether an established or new brand; whether creating long or short content; whether generating video, audio, or text; creating quality content wins. Every piece of content should have a purpose. Every piece of content should deliver value. Every piece of content should offer something unique. Every piece of content should require effort to produce.
Create New Things
A bold suggestion hides in one of the latter paragraphs of the article: for Fortune 500 companies to build a brand new type of content creation strategy. One that embraces long-form video or fiction or both to build brand loyalty. One that crafts the content around product rather than using product placement to hide and disguise the product within the media.
Whether you agree with Gary or not on the particular suggestion, the concept is novel. Not only that, it should serve as a beacon for large corporations to realize their need for media outlets and information streams and to manage their ability to traverse across multiple media types.
Conclusion
You can learn quite a bit from listening to and reading things by Gary Vaynerchuk. (Especially about wine).
However, when thinking about content, Gary gives us perspective in terms of who can create content at what level (anyone) (and at any length and format).
If you have an established brand with an audience, great! Keep up the good work. If you don't, while it may require more work you can still get rolling pretty quickly.
Otherwise, let your content be your guide. Try to get as many people interested in that content as you can.
Thoughts? Go read Gary's article and then ping me to join the conversation here.
