In this episode of the AI For All Podcast, Brendan Kane, Founder of Hook Point, joins Ryan Chacon and Neil Sahota to discuss AI in marketing and creating viral content. Kane talks about the significance of qualitative analysis to optimize content, mastering storytelling, and the importance of crafting a message that resonates with a wider audience. He speaks about the need for individuals and organizations to unlearn traditional marketing methods and adapt to new methods enhanced by AI. Kane also predicts that advancements in hardware will determine the evolution of social media.

Since 2005, Brendan Kane has helped the largest brands and celebrities in the world reverse engineer how to make content go viral. Brendan and his team at Hook Point have generated 60 billion views and 100+ million followers for the content they have worked on.

Over the course of his career, Brendan developed the first ever influencer campaign on YouTube in 2007, oversaw $200 million in marketing spend, worked with major corporations like MTV, Viacom, Vice Magazine, Paramount, Pictures, IKEA, and Sketchers, generated $1 billion in revenue for clients, worked with celebrities Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Adriana Lima on their digital strategy, generated over a million followers on his personal Facebook and Instagram account as an experiment, authored best selling books One Million Followers: How I Built a Massive Social Audience in 30 Days and Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World, and most recently developed The Hook Point Guide to Going Viral.

It takes 3 seconds to make or break your business. Hook Point helps your brand stand out in crowded markets. There are over 60 billion messages on digital platforms everyday. The average person is exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads every 24 hours. Inundated with choices, today’s consumers make decisions in milliseconds. How do you stand out and be heard? With an effective Hook Point.

(01:16) Introduction to Brendan Kane and Hook Point
(02:10) How to go viral
(08:25) Social media algorithms
(09:30) The attention economy
(10:44) How do you leverage AI tools?
(12:30) AI in marketing
(14:42) Qualitative and quantitative analysis
(16:32) Can anyone do data analysis?
(19:04) Will AI change how marketers are hired?
(21:50) Unlearning traditional marketing methods
(28:03) How long does it take to see results?
(30:22) Future of AI in marketing
(33:30) Learn more and follow up
(33:55) Brendan's new book

- [Ryan] Welcome everybody to another episode of the AI For All Podcast. I'm Ryan Chacon. With me is my co-host, Neil Sahota, the AI Advisor to the UN and one of the founders of AI for Good. Neil, how's it going?

- [Neil] Doing all right. I'm still in that post-Super Bowl going whoa what a game kind of mode right now.

- [Ryan] Did you have a rooting interest in it?

- [Neil] I'm originally from New York, so the Giants are my team, but I was pulling for the 49ers in this game.

- [Ryan] Some interesting mistakes happened in this game.

- [Neil] I thought it was fascinating that on Monday that they came out saying that the players hadn't prepared for overtime and weren't familiar with the rules. So it's, it seemed like it might have been good use of an AI coach assistant right there to think of that scenario.

- [Ryan] Most fans knew that the rule changed two years ago, and the players didn't. But anyways, that's a topic, we could have a whole podcast on that game.

- [Neil] I was going to say, we can do an ancillary podcast if the audience wants that, but we actually have a fantastic show with an amazing guest today, Ryan.

- [Ryan] We do, we do. We're gonna be talking about the role of AI in the marketing space, and that's a topic we have not covered yet. To discuss this, we have Brendan Kane, the founder of Hook Point here. Brendan, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.

- [Brendan] Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a true pleasure to connect with you and everybody that's tuning into this today.

- [Ryan] Absolutely. Let's kick this off by having you give a quick introduction about yourself and Hook Point to our audience.

- [Brendan] Yeah, so I'm most known for my work in the social media space. So, I'm the author of two books on social media. One is called One Million Followers and the other is Hook Point: How to Stand Out in A 3-Second World. And really started my career in the earliest stages of social media back to 2005 when Myspace and Friendster were the leading dominating factors. And ever since then, really have dedicated my career to understand how to break through the noise, break through the clutter, and reverse engineer what causes content, what causes messages, to go viral versus falling flat.

So, I've basically worked with every type of client and every type of sector around this core ethos of understanding what causes messaging to really resonate and break through to the highest levels.

- [Ryan] Good lead in to kind of our discussion because as technology has evolved, as marketing has evolved, as social media, as all these different new platforms have come out and grown, what it takes to go viral is something that so many people are or wish they knew or had a better understanding.

And I think when we apply that to organizations and companies who are looking to go viral, who are looking to get more attention on their brand, on their messaging, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make that happen, not just in the creation of the content itself, but also the strategy in which it is then deployed. If you could maybe talk a little bit about it from a high level, what goes into the process of something going viral, that'd be really cool.

- [Brendan] Yeah, so our approach is extremely different than how most people look at it, and I'll start with kind of the two big mistakes that I see people make in trying to engineer their virality of content.

The first is that most brands and companies are heavily focused on the quantitative layer, meaning they're looking at pure data of likes, views, shares, click-throughs, conversions, things of that nature, which is obviously a good indicator of something working or not working, but it doesn't uncover the why behind something working or not working. So, they're left to figure out if something did go viral, how do we reproduce those results? Or if something doesn't, what elements went wrong?

The second big mistake that I see in terms of engineering virality or kind of the strategies that people are employing is they're really only looking at their own content. They just keep analyzing their own content. And if your content's stuck at like 10,000 views a video, how are you gonna really learn to break through to that next level just analyzing your own.

So in terms of how we approach this is, number one is we look at the qualitative layer of really understanding what are the specific what we call performance drivers in storytelling that cause content to break through and detract from content to break through.

The second way that we look at it is we don't just look at our client's own content, we look at the larger social ecosystem. So what we do in terms of our preparation or kind of our process is we're looking at specific storytelling formats or structures that are going viral on specific platforms.

So I think that's one key takeaway that most people don't really understand with social media is there's a clear format that certain people follow and there's hundreds of these formats. Most people just look at social media as I'm just creating content, posting content, not looking at it from a format perspective.

And to give some context, I started my career in the film industry and if you think about watching a movie, every movie for the past 80 years has followed the same three act structure. That's a format. And that is used for drama, action, comedy, horror, no matter the subject matter or the genre, they're using that format.

Now, as it pertains to social media, there's many different formats out there. So to give you an example, one very successful format that I'm sure you've seen is called man on the street, and it's exactly what you would think is you approach a random stranger on the street, and you interact with them in some way. Like I have a friend, Alex Stemp, he's got 20 million followers, and he is a fashion photographer, approaches random strangers on the street, offers them professional photo shoots, and you watch the story unfold from there. So the first step is to understand there are formats out there. Understand what is the format that is best suited to your brand, and then do a deep qualitative analysis of what causes that format to work. Because most people will look at a format like man on the street and on a surface level, they think they understand what's going on, but what they don't realize is that 99% of the people that try that format fail. So what's the difference between the people that succeed? What's the difference between the people that fail? And that's where the qualitative analysis comes in.

And so what we do is we take a format like that, and we'll look at a channel, and we'll pull five of the high performers. In that format, it could be 50 million views plus in the high performers. Then we'll look at the average, which is like a few million, and then we'll look at the under performers, which is like a hundred thousand views or less. And then, what we're doing is we're looking at, from a qualitative standpoint, what's happening in those high performers that's not happening in the average or under performers. And we look at it the lens, through the lens of what I mentioned called performance drivers. So, we're looking at things like pacing, tonality, number of edits, first three seconds, captions, title cards, facial expressions, body cues. There's over 200 different performance drivers that we look at in terms of this analysis, and what we're trying to understand is what are the contributing factors, and it's really not about the contents, it's about the context of those elements, that contribute to the successful use of that format versus the unsuccessful use, so that we can really dive in at a deep, qualitative level to understand if we are gonna do this format, we have a clear blueprint in terms of executing off of it.

- [Neil] It sounds like there's a lot of different variables in play here, and you're talking about social media algorithms that are prioritizing or deprioritizing content. Obviously you have a lot of different market segments. How are you able to actually then tie all these different moving pieces together? That seems like it's a really complicated analysis.

- [Brendan] It is, and the way that we look at it is we, as we're doing this analysis, we try to distill it down to like three to five core performance drivers. We're not analyzing all like 200 plus of them with a single video. But a lot of pieces do need to fall into place in order for it to be successful.

For example, when I was working in the movie industry, it was a fascinating experience because you could have the best script in the world, the best director in the world, the best actor in the world, and the movie could still turn out like crap because one element would be off in that. So there is nuance in terms of going off and executing with it.

But you had mentioned the algorithms and playing to them. And the algorithms are an interesting subject because people I think overthink it. They over analyze it. These algorithms for social platforms are very simplistic. If you look at their underlying business goal, what is their underlying business goal. To serve more ads. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to retain people each session, each time they log in, the times they log in as long as possible. So what they're looking for is content that they can seed to as many people as possible and grab and hold that attention. So in terms of why does something get 10,000 views versus 10 million views, it's because the 10 million view video did a better job of unfolding a story that captured and held attention longer than other content. So in terms of all the analysis and pulling things together, it's really about how do we use this analysis to just tell a more compelling story. And the more and more you do it, the better and better that you get and start seeing the patterns and executing at a high level.

- [Neil] That goes to your book, which I've read, it's a fantastic book, Hook Point, that you literally have three seconds to capture someone's attention because there's just such a flood of content. It sounds like even if you get them in that first three seconds, you have to do something like the next 10 seconds or the next 30 seconds to keep them there.

- [Brendan] Yeah, so it, we, as the title of states, we live in a 3-second world from the ability to capture attention. Now that doesn't mean, people equate our world to micro attention, and they think just people have micro attention spans. But once you've grabbed their attention, they will stick with you as long as the story is engaging or unfolds. It's the reason people will binge watch a series on Netflix. They get enveloped in a story and a character, and they'll sit for 10 hours and watch an entire season of a show. Or why people will listen to podcasts and listen to long form. In order to break through, we still need to win those first three seconds because if we don't win those first three seconds and grab their attention and say, hey, this is something worth paying attention to, you never get that chance to demonstrate to the viewer or the listener that, hey, this is worth spending a lot of time with.

- [Neil] How do you leverage like some of these tools like AI to facilitate your work?

- [Brendan] The way that we're looking at AI and leveraging AI is taking our qualitative analysis and pumping it into AI platforms because as you guys know, these are very powerful tools, but they're only as good as the input and the understanding of the output as well. So what we're using it for predominantly right now, because the visual nature is getting there, but it's not quite there, is an example is script writing. So what we do is we use all these qualitative elements for a specific format, then we use the key findings to pump that in. We create script templates, pump those script templates into AI with the qualitative analysis, and then we analyze the output and then refine the output there. So, we're using it on the front end, but we're also using it on the back end of our understanding of the analysis and why things are working to make sure that we're getting the best quality and the best use of these tools. And we're still testing kind of the visual nature of how we, in the future as it gets better, control all the visual elements through editing or AI avatars and those natures or that nature to maximize the power of these tools going forward. But again, we look at it as a tool, not an all-end solution, and we look at it as a tool to pump our analysis in and then use our also our analysis to analyze the output to make sure that we're maximizing the potential that these tools provide.

- [Ryan] Outside of the work that you all do internally, how are you seeing AI play even a larger role in the marketing for organizations just from, just your vantage point. How are you seeing AI just change the landscape when it comes to marketing for organizations and other industries or just other people that you talk to that are in this space? What are you seeing really happen?

- [Brendan] I think in some ways, as I talked about, I think people think it's a cheat code to be like, oh, this tool is gonna solve virality for us and solve our marketing issues. I think in some ways, and it's the same with social media, social media is a blessing and a curse in that anybody can pick up a phone, press record, post something.

So it's a blessing that it's this powerful tool that anybody can post a message to the world. The curse is there's not a lot of thought process that goes into actually using this tool versus I went to film school, you spend years studying directors, understanding dialogue, writing, script writing, all these elements. I think that's happening a little bit with AI too at this juncture is like, ChatGPT, amazing tool, but it's made it so easy that most people just think, oh, I'm just gonna put in a question and I'm gonna get this magical answer to solve everything. So, I think that from a marketing perspective of where we're at today, I think that there's a lot of kind of hoping that this is just gonna solve a larger, underlying issue, which is how do we tell better stories and really engage people, capture their attention, hold their attention. And I think that people are just relying too heavily on AI to solve those versus, again, you need to have that fundamental understanding of what you're looking at and what you're feeding it and how to analyze it from the back end. So I think that there's gonna be, and I think it's starting to happen a little bit of people starting to understand that there's more thought that needs to go into how to use these tools to maximize the benefit on the back end of it.

- [Ryan] And you mentioned two things earlier. You talked about the input into a tool and then obviously the output. When it comes to the data side of this, we understand I think just at a high level, I mean from all of our conversations in the past, why data is so important when it comes to AI in general, but how do you see or how do you, what advice do you have for companies looking to make sure that they have the best data available to use for any tool? Whether it's working with you all, working with other organizations, why is data so important and how can they ensure that they're working to get the best data possible?

- [Brendan] In terms of kind of the work that we do, we're heavily focused on the qualitative layer, and why I think that's so important is that there is tremendous value in quantitative, but when we're talking about storytelling and how to become better storytellers, how to go viral, how to create better marketing, it really comes down to these qualitative elements, and I would say 9 out of 10 companies I talk to, they're not doing any of that type of analysis. So what my first recommendation would be is, yes, continue down that path in the quantitative layer, but really how do you build a process, a system, or even educating your internal team of understanding the qualitative elements that drive to break-through performance.

For us, we're just creating Google spreadsheets. We're not using fancy technology or anything like that, but we spend the long man hours to break these things down. But I think that the first step is, in terms of starting, is, you know, just having internal conversations with your team, creating a structure to actually look at the qualitative elements and really understand what's the difference between a high performer and a low performer and then pump that analysis into any AI tool that you're using.

- [Neil] Are people able to do that? Because I think about this that there's obviously a good chunk of like data science involved here. Can the average marketer look at some of the stuff and say, okay, it's this kind of combination of qualitative metrics that are really driving it? Or is it that just the average person, because this is typically what I see, they think it's like this one or two things that jumps out at them and thinks, okay, ah, that's the secret to unlocking success.

- [Brendan] It's a great question. And when I give my keynotes, I actually do a qualitative analysis exercise with the audience where I put two videos, same format, same creator on the screen. We watch both, and then I ask them which one performed better And 99% of the time they get it right of which one performed better. And then we reveal the results of what drove that performance, and it does take some time to get good at it, but I'm surprised more and more that people have these skill sets. They just don't even look at content in that perspective. The simple exercise of putting two pieces of content in the screen and just talking through what's the difference between them, that's qualitative analysis at a very high level, and the more that you do that, the more that you learn that you build that skill set.

It's the same thing where most people could sit down, or most people do this, they sit down, they watch a movie, and they say that was a great movie or that was a bad movie. And typically it will align with what the top critics in the world do. But most of us don't sit down and talk about the differences between a filmmaker making an amazing film and a film that's just not that great. So just the pure exercise of awareness and keep doing that will build that skill set within people. So, I don't think that you need to be a marketing wizard in order to do it. Now, marketing people with a lot of marketing experience may pick up on nuances quicker than other people, but it is an exercise that people can do. And like I just did it for I think it was like 500 mortgage loan officers. So, you don't think them as, it's not like creative directors, and they got, I did four exercises with them, and they got it right every time. Now did they understand all the nuances and the difference between the two? No, but they did pick up on there was a difference and that's the first step to then taking to the next level to do that type of analysis.

- [Ryan] Yeah, it's super interesting because I was gonna ask you if you feel like with the growth of these new tools and technologies and AI and so forth, if it requires organizations to adjust the way they hire for marketing positions. If there's a certain skill set that is required as we look into the future in order to do marketing well compared to maybe what was required in the past. Do you see any type of, because it sounded like from that part of the conversation, it sounded like people have these skills internally. They may just not know how to think about it or how to approach it. But what do you think about the future of marketing with new technologies, with AI, new data, all that kind of stuff, and what's required to do that job well for an organization?

- [Brendan] It's a great question, and I would say that's one of the biggest challenges we face in having success in working with clients, is purely a mindset perspective. So in terms of when we hire, or we advise clients in hiring, we're not looking for the most skilled or experienced person. We're looking for the person that has the most mindset that is open to learning, open to adapting to things.

A lot, with a lot of these kind of tools and processes, they can be trained, and they can be trained relatively quickly. But the people that succeed, like some of our best case studies are people with no social media experience creating content on their iPhone. And the reason that they're successful and sometimes more successful than our multi-billion dollar a year corporate clients is just that eagerness, that openness to learn and to adapt to these new ways of leveraging tools, to storytelling and things of that nature.

In terms of hiring, is, especially as you look to AI, and I'm talking specifically of how you leverage AI tools, not building AI technology, is really find, and it, I don't think it necessarily has to be an age thing, although typically the younger the person is, the more kind of eager and hungry they are to learn. But just somebody that or a group of people that are just always looking to perform better. Always open to removing preconceived notions, things that they thought were the right way of doing things, or they were trained to do something years ago, and now they have to forget all of that and look at the world in a new way.

And I think that's also that you see the early adopters of AI, those are people that are looking at the world in a different way and challenging the way that we've done things in the past instead of fighting against it.

- [Neil] It's like you almost have to unlearn. Ironically, we had a conversation within the UN this morning about some of these things that, you look at like Africa and parts of Asia, they never had a landline infrastructure. And so when you had the, essentially the release of mobile phones and the smartphones, they were the ones that really started pioneering things like mobile payments and some of these things because they weren't locked in the mode of thinking of this is how landlines work, so that like leap frog moment. It sounds like people that are less experienced or no experience can tap into that, but it sounds like there's a path for people who've been doing this for 10, 15 years to almost step back and find a different way of doing this.

- [Brendan] Yeah, I think you hit it right on the head. You used the perfect word, Neil, unlearn. We run into that a lot, and I'll give you a prime example is thinking back pre-social media, there was all these creative processes that were developed. And one of the key things that we hear a lot is people are trained or taught that you're creating a niche message for a niche audience.

Now, if we're talking about virality and how to get content to break through at the highest level, we actually train people to think the opposite of. What we call the generalist principle is we still want to create a core message and story that resonates with our core audience, but how do we make that core message or story interesting to anybody without diluting down what we're trying to achieve? Because again, if you think about the social media algorithms, they want to seed content to the widest possible audience and retain attention. They are not gonna do the hard work and see, oh, you're an accountant, this piece of content was designed for only people that are interested in accounting because in reality they don't have to do that heavy work for you because they have so much content to choose from. In addition, that mindset typically leads to poor storytelling.

And I'll give you an example is there's a YouTuber that teaches finance to Millennials. Now, finance is not a sexy subject, especially teaching it to Millennials, it's difficult. His most viewed video is How I Bought a Tesla for $78 a Month. So with that context, anybody would be interested to see how this young guy bought a Tesla for $78 a month, and within that he's teaching the principles of car financing. And that video got like something like 10 million views. If that that video was positioned the top five ways to finance a car for Millennials, it would've probably gotten 10,000 views.

So just the dynamic of this generalist principle of how we shift and unlearn this thing that we've been told in the past that we need to create a niche message for a niche audience, we break the mold of that, and then we can expand our message to the world. And with that, our core audience grows. So if it was the top five principles for car financing for Millennials, and it was 10,000 views, let's just say 8,000 of those 10,000, 80% was our core target. Now, let's just say it was out of that 10 million views of How I Bought a Tesla for $78 a Month, our core target was only 20% of those views.

It's 2 million people versus 8,000. It's like which one would you rather have? Now that completely goes against what was taught in marketing agencies, marketing schools, and marketing books 20 years ago. That's kind of, Neil, to what you said is this unlearning of looking at content, looking at the world in a completely different way.

- [Neil] You're almost having to generify your market, not your target market, but your, the way you appeal to the market segments.

- [Brendan] Yeah. But without diluting your core message and what you represent. But that's where you'll see on social media, people think that, oh, my subject matter's not sexy enough to break through. You'll see tax accounts go viral. I just worked, had a meeting with a botanist that's gone viral. Fitness, nutrition, real estate, any subject matter with the right context can go viral and build a massive audience. But it's looking at the world in a completely different way and unlearning what they told you in terms of how to market previously.

- [Ryan] Yeah, I'll say just from my own experience with social media recently, I've been spending more time in, it's on Instagram in the Reels, which is gonna be feeding me many different kinds of things, and I've been able to discover topics that I probably would not have discovered on my own through search or through the accounts that I follow.

So obviously I know there's work behind the scenes from an algorithm standpoint feeding me these things, but the way that these people of all different ages are approaching a lot of these topics that if you were to think of them on the surface are potentially dull and boring, to make them applicable to something that someone of my age would be interested in. I've learned about industries and different things that I would never have gone and discovered on my own, and I think it's based on what you're saying, the approach they're taking to make it more general while still honing in on their target audience is very effective.

- [Brendan] You could even look at it from an analogy of movies, is like movies that take a subject matter that may not be interesting to you on a surface level. Like just think about the Fast and the Furious franchise. How many people were interested in street racing before Fast and the Furious, but it's one of the most successful movie franchises because of the story and the context around the subject matter, and it's the same thing with social media. What's the story in the context around your specific expertise? There's a guy, and I can't remember his name, but he has a love for trains, and he has millions of followers watching him interact with trains. And you would never think that would be something that most people would find interesting. And that's really where social media has gone to and just a testament to the best storytellers that can take these abstract or typically small niches and turn them into something that's massive.

- [Neil] I think there's a lot of great info here, and I think maybe we need to also help set expectations for marketers and our audience here. This is not like a cheat code that it happens overnight. And that's been my experience with a lot of emerging technology like AI or the Metaverse that people think, ah, I'm gonna use this tool and bam, see results right away. How long does it actually take? All these things you're talking about that needs to be done Brendan, how long before people really see that kind of change and the value get created?

- [Brendan] Yeah, it's a great question, and there's not a clear cut answer to it. Some people, like you said, it's not a cheat code, it's not any, it's just like how can you become a masterful storyteller? And that's why we simplify it for people is, one takeaway from this conversation today is start looking at social media from a format perspective. Realize there are formats out there. Find the format that works for you, that excites you, and then just dig a little bit deeper. That will set you apart from 99% of content creators out there because 99% of them are not looking at the world in that way. Now, in terms of how long it takes you to see results using that format dictates how quickly can you master that specific format? Some people will get it in a few weeks, some people will get it in a year. Some people will give up and never see the results.

So, I would just start possibly, especially if you're a beginner, or somebody that maybe you're not a beginner to social media, but you just really haven't seen the results, you don't have a lot of resources. Maybe look at formats that you can do on your own. There's another businessman, Robert Croak, who's got a million followers on TikTok. He shares his 25 years of experience with walking listicles where he's literally talking to his phone walking around the block, but he has a format that really shares information in a very digestible and an inspiring way. He built a million followers just doing things into his iPhone. So, I think looking at a format that you feel passionate about, that you feel can work for you, that you'd be excited to work on, and then focus on mastering those details. And again, the timeframe is all across the board, and it just comes down to your ability to leverage that format to tell a compelling story.

- [Ryan] Where do you have your attention set on? Kind of paying attention to new technologies, where AI is going, just or the space in general that the people listening to this should also be trying to pay attention to on how it's going to influence what they do on the marketing side, how it's gonna help them be more efficient and better, see better success with marketing. Just generally speaking on that topic, where should people be paying attention and what are you most looking forward to?

- [Brendan] I look at things in five year increments. I'm not as close to the technology to understand what's happening beyond five years, but I would just say is at least for the next five years, the big players, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, they're not gonna waiver. It's not like overnight they are going to disappear. So in terms of marketing, I would just be looking at AI, looking at understanding qualitative elements of storytelling, how to leverage AI to maximize off those learnings from a qualitative standpoint to really accelerate your growth because there's still a massive opportunity with that.

So, in some ways, I would say go back to the basics of understanding that marketing and creating content is you just telling a story and trying to engage and retain an audience through that story and become a master of those storytelling elements and then leverage AI to maximize the potential of those learnings and those data sets.

Beyond that, it's interesting with kind of what Apple's done with Vision Pro where there's so much interest driven around that versus what like Google Glass or Snapchat Glass has tried to do back in the day is if you really wanna look, forecast into the future of social media, it's gonna be driven by the hardware. These, and this is why Zuckerberg invested so much into VR and AR is because he realized that he's beholden to Android and the iPhone where he wants to try and control the future of what the hardware looks like. But if you wanna forecast beyond that five year window is just pay attention to the advancements in hardware and where that's going. I think Vision Pro is an interesting technology. Let's see what the adoption rate is and the evolution of that type of technology and where it goes.

All of these social platforms, all of these marketing channels are beholden to the hardware that it's served up on. So the hardware is always gonna dictate where these things go, what platforms are gonna succeed in the future, which ones are gonna survive.

- [Ryan] I think we've given our audience some great things to think about and also great ways to just try to remove themselves and as Neil said, unlearn some things to see what's being successful in the space for them to understand how these kind of templates and how these structures, how these different things are being put together and what's being successful and what's not. Neil, any last questions or words from your end?

- [Neil] I think it's been a fascinating conversation. We have some powerful tools, but I think Brendan has given us all great advice and that this really is shaped around our ability to tell stories.

You need that good hook point, but first and foremost step is the format. If our audience would like to learn more about you, your work, what's the best way to stay in touch with you?

- [Brendan] Yeah, they can visit hookpoint.com for more information. I do respond to messages on LinkedIn and Instagram, so I would just follow up there. I've got a new book coming out in a few months, so if they just follow those channels, they'll be some announcements of when and, when they can get access to that new book.

- [Ryan] Can you give us a teaser on what this book is about?

- [Brendan] Yeah. It's called The Guide to Going Viral, and basically it breaks down our entire creative model in depth. So it breaks down qualitative research, how we do the research, how you can do it yourself. So we go from all the way from research all the way to analyzing data and reveal every kind of aspect of the process that we've been developing over the past four or five years.

- [Ryan] Well, I'll definitely, personally be checking that out, so that'll be great. Brendan, thank you so much for doing this. Really appreciate your time. Great insights, topic we haven't covered before. Love what you guys have going on over there. So really appreciate you coming on and talking with our audience a bit.

- [Brendan] It was my pleasure, to connect with you and everybody that was tuning in for this today.