Shoptalk 2025: Where Retail, Media & Tech Collide

Shoptalk Fall 2025 is shaping up to be the event where retail, media, and technology collide. Fittingly, this year’s theme is “Retail Alchemy,” evoking the transformative mix of art and science modern retail demands. In this context, one session looms large on the agenda: Gary Vaynerchuk’s keynote, “The Alchemy of Relevance: Day Trading Attention.” It’s scheduled as the mainstage’s closing keynote on September 19, and it’s already one of Shoptalk’s most anticipated talks.

Why the buzz? In 2025, every marketer is acutely aware that capturing consumer attention has become both more critical and more difficult than ever. Shoptalk is known for spotlighting where commerce is headed, and Gary Vee’s keynote promises to address exactly that. The collision of retail, media, and tech – epitomized at Shoptalk – sets the perfect stage for Gary’s core message: that in today’s fragmented landscape, attention is the currency that matters most.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s POV: Attention Is the New Currency

 Gary Vaynerchuk (Gary Vee) has built his career on a single premise: whoever holds attention wins. As chairman of VaynerX, CEO of VaynerMedia, and creator of VeeFriends, he’s repeatedly spotted “underpriced attention” before the crowd — from early bets on Facebook and Snapchat to his push into TikTok and LinkedIn. In 2025, that same ability to trade attention assets in real time is exactly the edge retail marketers need.

Gary’s signature theme is that “people’s attention is the most valuable currency in the world today.” Marketers, he argues, must constantly find novel ways to engage an audience that has endless options for how to spend their time: “You have to find ways to grab people’s attention the moment they take out their phone and scroll… That’s the game marketers are playing today,” Vaynerchuk says. In his view, attention is a tradable asset – and the concept of “day trading attention” means actively arbitraging it. In practice, this translates to a relentless focus on underpriced attention: jumping onto emerging platforms and formats where consumer eyeballs are abundant but competition (and ad cost) is low.

This has been Gary’s playbook for years. He urged brands to embrace social networks like YouTube and Twitter in the 2000s, doubled down on Instagram and Snapchat in the 2010s, and more recently implored marketers to seize the moment on TikTok and even LinkedIn’s renaissance in organic reach. As he famously put it, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat became “the NBC, ABC, and CBS of our day,” yet too many companies failed to market in “the year we actually live in”.

Time and again, Vaynerchuk has pushed marketers to rethink their media mix, move budget to where consumer attention has shifted, and not get romantic about yesterday’s tactics. The title of his upcoming Shoptalk keynote – “The Alchemy of Relevance: Day Trading Attention” – nicely captures this ethos. It suggests that staying relevant is almost a magical mix of art and science: part creative alchemy, part analytical trading of attention assets in real time.

Why ‘Day Trading Attention’ Matters Now More Than Ever

Why is this skill set so critical for retail marketers in 2025? Look at the landscape they’re navigating:

Turbulence Around TikTok: One of the fastest-growing platforms for consumer attention remains in regulatory limbo. TikTok remains under heightened regulatory scrutiny in the U.S., which has already caused swings in media behavior – TikTok’s ad prices (CPMs) briefly plummeted 80% year-on-year during the uncertainty. At the same time, rivals like Instagram and YouTube saw spikes. Many retailers who built followings on TikTok are anxious about its future. Day trading attention means being prepared to pivot if a major attention platform disappears or loses favour. Gary Vee has long said you can’t be romantic about any single channel – you have to be ready to move wherever the audience goes next.

Ad Budgets Under Pressure: After the rollercoaster of pandemic-era spending, marketing budgets are tighter. In fact, CMOs report budgets flatlining around just 7.7% of company revenue this year (with many bracing for cuts). At the same time, media costs are rising – “media price inflation means CMOs are getting less bang per buck,” as Gartner analysts note. In short, marketers must do more with less. The ability to swiftly reallocate attention – to double down on an effective new organic channel, or pull back from an overpriced ad platform – is a survival skill when every dollar spent is scrutinised. Gary’s mantra of attention arbitrage directly addresses this: find the eyeballs that others undervalue and you can stretch a limited budget further.

AI-Fuelled Content Flood: The generative AI boom has unleashed a tsunami of content into every marketing channel. By April 2025, an estimated 74% of new online content had AI “fingerprints” on it. In other words, the internet is now flooded with blog posts, product descriptions, videos, and social posts churned out by tools like ChatGPT at unprecedented scale. This content deluge makes consumer attention even harder to earn – there’s exponentially more noise to cut through. For retail marketers, it raises the bar on creativity and relevance; bland, me-too messaging will get drowned out. It also means the advantage shifts to those who can spot new content formats or platforms before they get saturated. Day trading attention is about agility: the faster you identify a breakout format (be it short-form video, live shopping streams, AR lenses, or something new) that captures attention, the more you can rise above the AI-generated cacophony.

Fragmented Consumer Focus: Today’s consumers aren’t just on one or two channels – their attention is splintered across a dizzying array of apps, devices, and media formats. In the past few years, we’ve seen surges of interest in everything from ephemeral video apps to audio chatrooms to metaverse experiments. Even legacy platforms constantly evolve (Instagram’s algorithm shifts, YouTube Shorts emerge, etc.). As McKinsey researchers put it, the “explosion in content, platforms, and devices has fragmented consumers’ collective focus,” making it tougher for companies to keep audiences engaged. For retail brands, this means the old playbook of focusing on a couple of big ad channels is outdated – your potential customers might spend their next hour scrolling a niche app or interacting with smart home devices rather than watching TV or browsing the web. Attention is now a moving target, and only a day-trader mentality can keep up with its constant shifts.

All these factors point to one conclusion: in 2025, the ability to “day trade” attention isn’t just a clever concept – it’s a marketer’s must-have survival skill. Being able to read culture and data in real-time, spot where consumers are congregating, and nimbly redirect your efforts there can make the difference between riding the next wave or falling irreversibly behind. Gary Vee has been evangelising this approach for years, but it’s never been more relevant than it is right now.

Marketers’ Burning Questions for Gary Vee

In the lead-up to Shoptalk, we asked marketers on LinkedIn what they’d want Gary to answer. Their questions cut straight to the challenges of attention in 2025:

• When do you double down on a platform vs. move on? What metrics tell you it’s time?

• Beyond grabbing attention, what human insight actually gets customers to buy?

• How do you stay authentic while using AI to scale content?

• How can big brands realistically post 4–5 times a day across platforms without burning out teams?

These crowd-sourced questions show marketers buy into the idea of day trading attention — but want the practical playbook for how to execute it under real-world constraints.

All Eyes on Gary’s Shoptalk Keynote

All of this sets the stage for Gary Vaynerchuk’s Shoptalk keynote with unprecedented anticipation. It’s not just another celebrity speaker slot – it feels more like a timely intervention for an industry at an inflection point. Everyone will be watching to see how Gary connects the dots: between his classic principles (attention as currency, underpriced attention, relentless content output) and the current context of retail marketing. Will he reveal new tactics for the post-TikTok, AI-saturated era? Will he challenge retailers to rethink their org structures or KPIs to truly day-trade attention?

If you can’t be in the room for Gary’s talk, don’t worry – ClickZ will have you covered. We’ll be on the ground at Shoptalk providing live coverage of key insights from Gary’s keynote, and we’ll publish a follow-up with the biggest takeaways and how retail marketers can act on them. Follow our Shoptalk 2025 coverage on ClickZ and stay tuned for the post-keynote analysis.