Jab, jab, jab, right hook

Picture a marketer in 2013 staring at a Facebook dashboard that used to print money and now barely puts up a pulse. The post that pulled ten thousand engagements last spring just got two hundred. The link clicks have evaporated. The CMO wants answers, and the answer the marketer is about to give — "we need more budget" — is exactly wrong.

That moment is where Gary Vaynerchuk starts. He wrote "Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook" on the back of a late-night red-eye home from a West Coast trip, frustrated by watching brands pour money into social media and get nothing back while smaller operators on the same platforms built audiences for free. He thought he knew why, and the book is his attempt to prove it. The premise is a boxing metaphor. Jabs are the content you give your audience — the laugh, the photo, the moment of value, the thing they actually wanted to see. The right hook is the ask. Most brands skip straight to the right hook. They get knocked out, and they cannot figure out why.

The argument has aged better than the platforms in it. Vine is gone. Tumblr is a ghost town. EdgeRank has been renamed and rewritten a dozen times. The case studies feature brands that no longer exist in the form they did a decade ago. None of that matters. The mistake the book diagnoses is still the dominant mistake in marketing, and the cure is still the cure. Respect the platform. Give before you ask. Tell the story in the language the audience is already speaking.

The Setup: Why the Old Playbook Stopped Paying

The book opens with a question that sounds rhetorical and isn't: where is your phone right now? Vaynerchuk's bet is that it is within four feet of you, and that at any given moment, in any public space, someone within arm's reach is on a social network. Three hundred and twenty-five million mobile subscriptions in the United States. Seventy-one percent of Americans on Facebook. Five hundred million on Twitter, from the pope to a parrot named Rudy. People check social platforms forty times a day, often before they even get out of bed. One in four make a purchasing decision based on what they see there. Boomers, who control seventy percent of disposable income in the country, increased their social usage forty-two percent in a single year.