Brad Weimert: Brendan Kane, I appreciate you carving out some time.

Brendan Kane: Pleasure to meet you. Thanks for having me. It’s great to connect with you and everybody that’s tuning in for this.

Brad Weimert: Absolutely. So, there are a lot of things to cover but I want to start with the claim to be the first person to do an influencer campaign on YouTube in 2007 because I think it sets the stage for kind of a lot of things after that. Can you tell me about that? And we’ll jump off from there.

Brendan Kane: Yeah. So, I started my career in the film industry. I initially wanted to be a film producer and went to film school, quickly realized it didn’t teach you anything about business in film and figured that I needed to learn the fundamentals of what it means to launch and manage a business just to gain that kind of skill set. So, I started a few internet companies while I was going to college, and then when I moved to LA to pursue a career in film back in 2005, like everybody else, I started at the bottom. I was making coffees, copies, deliveries, things of that nature. And I needed to find a way to kind of capture the attention of the higher-ups, the studio executives, directors, producers, things of that nature.

And when anybody would ask me, “Well, why did I move to LA?” I would say I wanted to be a film producer and I could see everybody’s eyes glaze over because there was one of a million. They didn’t need another film producer. So, I had to take a step back and kind of analyze the situation. And I noticed in the studio that I was working for is like every time we finished a film, there would be a sense of anxiety and stress that would come over the office because we invested tens of millions of dollars into a single piece of content, and then we needed hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about this piece of content in a matter of months. We didn’t have years or decades like you do in a typical kind of company building a brand, building a company.

So, I just noticed that at the time, social media was emerging. Myspace and Friendster were the predominant players. And then Facebook had launched and YouTube was gaining momentum. And I just noticed that on YouTube, and influencers weren’t a thing at the time. The term ‘influencer’ didn’t exist but I noticed there were these individuals that were building these YouTube channels, reaching millions of people, and we were working on a movie called Crank with Jason Statham, and it was an action movie, but it wasn’t like a $100 million budget film. You know, it was relatively modest. I think it was like a $12 or $15 million budget film. And for an action movie, that’s not a lot of money and thus the marketing budget behind it wasn’t a ton.

So, I just went to the head of the studio and also to the directors and said, “Hey, I’m noticing these people on YouTube that have all of this traffic, all this visibility. Why don’t we engage with them?” So, I just made a list of like the top 100, and I just started cold messaging each of them, and then we got like four or five to collaborate with us, and we didn’t pay anything for it. So, that was kind of the foray into tapping into this kind of concept of what an influencer could be.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I remember Crank, actually, because it was super, super intense from the beginning.

Brendan Kane: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. There were very few movies where you turn it on and from the first moment you’re anxious the entire time until the end, and there’s no break.

Brendan Kane: Yeah. And the directors are like that, too, but it was a lot of fun. We captured a lot of funny things and had Jason Statham do a lot of funny things that he normally wouldn’t do, and kind of you can see that after that, he started to spark his interest in comedy movies, and it was because he had the ability to kind of flex that muscle in that film.

Brad Weimert: I love that. Well, that plays into, I mean, the kind of what allowed those influencer relationships to work. So, the notion of piggybacking on credibility has been around a long time, but the idea of doing it specifically on social platforms and with people that are influential for different reasons as opposed to, “Oh, it’s an A-list celebrity so let’s get them to endorse our brand,” leveraging a social following is a very different proposition. And I think that’s the foundation or the genesis of the word influencer. Right? Is this new concept of like, “Oh, it doesn’t have to be an A-list celebrity. It’s just somebody controlling an audience.” What has changed in your mind from 2007 to today it’s 2024, mid-2024, relative to engaging influencers?

Brendan Kane: Well, I think that it’s more of a set industry, like back in 2007 when I was doing this, there wasn’t really an industry like, again, there wasn’t the term ‘influencer.’ I basically just reached out to these content creators and I said, “Do you want to interview a movie star?” I mean, it was that simple of a hook that resonated versus when you look at it today, it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. Like, there are some structure to it. And there’s everything from and it’s gone through its phases. There was the phase where it was just get the biggest influencer with the biggest numbers and you’re willing to pay a huge amount to access their audience and access the connection with them in your brand to more sophisticated actual attribution tracking and understanding whether or not this specific influencer and audience is the right fit to kind of looking at micro-influencer strategies.

So, I would say that the industry and the ways that you can maximize the potential of it are far more structured and sophisticated in the beginning because there was very limited understanding of what it meant to engage with these people. Also, there was very limited data and information about audiences and engagement and things of that nature, where today the market is just saturated with influencer tools and ways to aggregate influencers, understand the demographics, engagement rates, things of that nature. So, there’s a lot more of them out there and there’s a lot more tools at your disposal to harness the power of it if you go down in that direction.

Brad Weimert: Well, while we’re on that, and you mentioned that basically the proposition was, “Hey, do you want to interview a celebrity?” and then there was no cost and no money exchanged, which would be a tough ask today. I mean, depending on the celebrity, of course, but speaking of metrics and tools, give me a couple of use cases because your roster of people that you’ve helped with your agency, Hook Point, goes from massive names like Taylor Swift and Rihanna to MTV to creators on YouTube or otherwise. So, you’ve got kind of the range. If you’re trying to engage an influencer on a large scale versus a small scale, what are the metrics you look for and track and how do you approach those differently?

Brendan Kane: Well, our company doesn’t really work a tremendous amount in terms of connecting brands with influencers but I can give some recommendations because I have done it over the course of my career. I think first, as I already mentioned, is don’t get enamored with the numbers. Just because it’s a big number next to their name doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for your company. It doesn’t mean that their audience isn’t powerful. It just whether it is a direct kind of correlation to what that audience may be interested in. What I would recommend is if you have a set budget, is try and diversify that budget across as many influencers as possible. Test that budget to identify which influencers or audiences are actually converting, meaning you need to actually have attribution set up.

Like, there’s a lot of companies that don’t understand like when a sale happens, where exactly did that sale come from? So, that’s a big element to this process is if you’re going to engage with an influencer in any capacity, whether you’re paying them, giving them free product, it’s critically important that you have the attribution set up so that you can understand what is success and what is not success because if it’s not successful, obviously you don’t want to continue investing down that path, whether it’s time, money, resources. But just as important, if it is successful, you want to be able to understand how to duplicate that level of success. So, number one, don’t get caught up in huge numbers. Number two, try and diversify against as many influencers as possible and testing it.

Number three, I would say in terms of negotiating or working with these influencers, as long as it’s kind of transparent and honest with the direction you want to go, just say, “Hey, listen, we’re looking for a long-standing relationship with content creators and influencers.” So, if this performs, we can pay you more down the next deal and the next deal from that, where we don’t over-invest in that initial one. And then I think the last point is I think people underestimate this or don’t even look at it, is make sure that in that negotiation or in that initial campaign, that you have the ability to run paid against that organic post because one of the things you’ve got to understand with organic, most of the time the creator is not going to reach 100% of their audience. You know, it could be as low as 10% or even lower than that.

So, you want to make sure that especially if the content works, you have the ability to hit 100% saturation with that audience and probably at a multiple frequency to really maximize the potential of the asset they’ve created, and then also the potential to test it outside of their audience to see if it can be scaled further. Most people look at influencers and say, “Oh, they have a huge audience. They’re going to post something once and that’s it. Our job is done.” But there’s a whole other aspect to look at it from a paid perspective that you can really maximize the potential if that creative asset that they’ve created is converting for you.

Brad Weimert: So, I want to dig into the nuances of running paid against organic because I think that that’s super important. And also, it gets very granular from platform to platform and there are specific questions I have there. But to recap influencer strategy and, obviously, you’ve had a ton of experience with it, whether your agency does this or not directly. If you’re smaller, like let’s say you’re launching your first influencer campaigns, are sort of micro-influencers going to be a viable strategy? I mean, what I heard was diversify the influencers and test a bunch of things. Do you go micro at that point? And if you’re larger, does micro still seem like a reasonable strategy or do you try to find bigger people? What do you think is most effective from that perspective?

Brendan Kane: It really depends on the situation of the company but micro strategies are a great place or micro influencers are a great place to start, especially if you have limited budget. I just hate to see companies if they have a limited budget just to go after one influencer. But I see companies that use micro-influencer strategies all the time. So, micro-influencer strategies, obviously, you’re diversifying your risk. There’s not as big of an upside with each micro-influencer. But however, as we talked about the paid side is if you find a micro-influencer that creates a piece of content that’s really hitting the chord in converting, you can really feel the reach behind that and the potential sales behind it. So, if you’re getting started, I think micro-influencers are a good place to start because at least you can get that process going, understand.

You know, because there are nuances of how you communicate with these people. There’s some people that are just not going to respond. There are some people that are horrible to work with. There are some people that are great to work with. So, if it’s your first time, definitely, going micro-influencer is an easier approach and it can be effective. Just because they’re small, doesn’t mean it can’t correlate to an effective campaign. As you grow, just make sure that if you’re going to be cutting those bigger checks that you really understand what you’re going in with. Just if you’re a very successful company today, have a lot of revenue, and even have a big budget, and you’ve never done an influencer campaign, I still hesitate to say, “Just go and spend a ton of it on a huge influencer if you’ve never done it before.”

Because you want to kind of knock out that rust of the first few times to do it because you’re going to learn something each time you create one of these campaigns. And even if it’s not going to have the maximum impact in the beginning, that learning experience is just going to set you up for greater success as you cut those bigger checks.

Brad Weimert: So, let’s talk about what to look for. You mentioned it’s not just the number and it’s alignment with your brand. And so, that makes total sense to me. From a metric perspective, a lot of people tend to get trapped in vanity metrics, and how many views, how many likes. It’s great if you can pin it back to actual ROI. What are intermediate metrics that you look at and how do you track them?

Brendan Kane: Well, I think first off, just understanding the type of content and the relationship they have with their audience like it’s common sense but like I don’t think hiring a beauty stylist to promote a cooking product is probably the right correlation there. At the same time, if you’re hiring a beauty stylist and they’ve promoted ten competing products over the past six months, maybe it’s not a good fit. So, getting a real understanding of what is the relationship they have with their audience, what other types of products or services have they promoted. In addition, what happens to those numbers once they promote that product? Because often people can get enamored and see, “Oh, this person got 10 million views on this video,” but the minute they integrate a product into it, it drops to 10,000 views.

So, that understanding of that relationship they have and if you want to take a step further, and I recommend, especially if you’re going to invest a lot, is what do the comments look like when they actually integrate a product into that video? In addition, you can get metrics either from the influencer themselves or there’s other platforms out there that can break down kind of the demographics of that audience to ensure that it connects. So, for example, as like if you have a swimsuit model and you want to sell swimsuits to females, but their demographic is like 80% males because she’s a beautiful woman, maybe that’s not a direct correlation to where you want to go. But I’ve also seen the flip side where a fashion brand wants to sell to women, but then they look at this female influencer and they say, “Oh, it’s probably all men following her,” without actually looking in and digging into kind of the insights of it.

So, as much as you can understand about who this person is, and I’m talking more about kind of the bigger influencers like micro-influencers, you can diversify the risk and test like 20 and just see what the data shows you but if you’re getting into that kind of higher tier is just really understanding what is the relationship, what is the type of content, what happens when they integrate a product into their content? How many times have they done it? Those types of things that can kind of inform whether or not it’s going to be fruitful. In addition to what I said before is try and approach them to say, “Hey, listen, I don’t want to spend a ton of money on this first one but I want to develop a long-standing relationship with you.” How do they respond to that? Now, obviously, you’re a new company coming in and they may have a huge demand for their time.

So, how do they respond to that? Are they really excited about working with you? Do they just want the paycheck? Are they open to building a long-standing relationship? Those are all types of things that you want to kind of feel out in that process to make the determination whether it’s the right fit to collaborate with them on.

Brad Weimert: It’s 2024, almost June, so all grain of salt because things move quickly and change. But there’s always a request and demand for platforms specifically to track this stuff. So, for the sake of reference, can you mention any platforms that are good for tracking influencer or metric data?

Brendan Kane: There was a company I worked with early on. It was called Social Edge. They may have rebranded but they’ve been in this space for 14 or 15 years, and they probably invested $100 million in this space. So, I would look up Social Edge or if they’ve rebranded, you should be able to find the company. That’s the one company I do know that I did a lot of due diligence and communicating with the CEO in terms of kind of the tech stack that they built.

Brad Weimert: Cool. Awesome. Well, let’s go back to the paid side of things. So, I think when people are trying to figure out virality and social content in general or even SEO, they isolate organic versus paid in their mind. And new entrepreneurs that are bootstrap, in particular, look at that and don’t have a budget for paid and so they think, “Hey, I’m just going to go SEO or organic,” which is really synonymous. What’s the value for everybody listening of pushing paid into that? And let’s use that as a starting point and let’s go platform-specific here.

Brendan Kane: Well, the first place I would start in any platform is if you’re pushing paid behind organic, has it performed organically first? Because pushing paid behind a piece of content that hasn’t broken through is not fixing the underlying problem, which is the content. So, that’s what I always recommend as it pertains to putting paid behind organic is only do it if the content has already proven to perform organic because you will see a plateau. And once it’s plateaued, if it’s shown some elements of success, then it’s worth putting paid behind it. But paid does not fix underlying content issues. And that’s what a lot of people kind of think is like, “Oh, the algorithm is suppressing my reach to get me to just pay for that reach.” And that’s just not the case. So, I think that that’s kind of the biggest thing to kind of look at.

The other thing to what you said is, and I hear this a lot from businesses, is that they don’t have a budget for paid. Well, you can start with a minimal budget but if that paid budget is generating profit for you, why wouldn’t you invest in it? And you can easily go and find funding sources to fund the paid if you need to. But advertising content should be generating profit for your company, and if it’s generating profit, you can always find funds or budget out there to kind of fuel that growth. But in terms of platform-specific, it’s pretty much the same across platforms. There’s a lot of kind of miss out there about, well, if I run paid behind my content, the algorithm will see that I’m running paid. So, it’ll automatically suppress my reach across all of my content to get me to pay more. These platforms don’t work that way.

All of these social media algorithms are designed for one thing, and that’s retention, meaning they want to keep people on these platforms as long as possible because the longer somebody spends on the platform to consume that content, the more ads they can serve and the more profit they generate. So, when they find content that’s retaining audience, they want to see that to as many people as possible. So, it’s not like it’s just automatically because they’ve seen you run paid against a piece of content, suppress all of your content on purpose if you’re a great content creator. On the flip side is if you’re not a great content creator and you keep putting paid behind it, it’s not going to automatically jumpstart your engagement and generate a loyal audience of people that are going to consume that content.

Brad Weimert: So, start with don’t make sh*tty content. That’s the beginning.

Brendan Kane: Yeah, which is a tough task. I mean, like you ask like what’s the difference between 2007 and 2024 is I don’t know what the exact numbers are but when I first started in social media, there’s a few million people on this platform. Today, it’s about to hit 5 billion. So, you’re talking about 5 billion people on these platforms pushing billions of pieces of content into the world every day. It’s very cutthroat for that retention of audience. And a lot of people think it’s the content that sucks. It’s more the context and the storytelling that’s not really breaking through. The thing that I see is like social media is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because anybody can pull out their phone, push record, and reach the world. It’s truly democratized communication because pre-social media, that didn’t exist. You had to go through a television station or radio station, print publications, things of that nature. But anybody can pull out their phone, push record. Now, the downside to that is anybody can pull out their phone and push record without any thought put into it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. It’s democratized broadcast, not democratized communication, right? So, you can broadcast anything but you can’t necessarily connect with everybody. So, like in… I’m sorry. Go ahead. But there’s a distinction there that’s worthwhile, which is, yes, everybody can pull out their phone but through that, it muddied the ability to actually have a functional channel to communicate with people. Because if you don’t have the reach, you don’t have the reach, which is…

Brendan Kane: Well, it’s not about the reach. It’s about the skill set as nobody’s forced to learn the skill set like I started in film school and I went to film school around like 2003-2004. So, this is pre-real digital cameras and stuff. Like, you had to sit there and you had to break down classic films. Even if you didn’t want to be a screenwriter, you had to write a screenplay to understand it. You had to learn how to light cinematography. When I first started, you had to cut film like there was a lot of thought process that went into training you what it takes to make a film and tell a story through that. But you fast forward today with social media, there is none of that. That requirement isn’t there but making a film like nobody’s going to give you all the money to make a film if you haven’t proven that you understand how to tell stories to that medium.

Even today, making a film with an iPhone or things of that nature, you still need to get crew and actors and all of these things to kind of buy into yourself as like a storyteller. But with social media, that barrier of entry isn’t there, and most people haven’t been trained to think that. So, they think that going viral is luck, when in reality it’s a science. There’s a science to communicating on these platforms in those same way there’s a science to communicating through film or television or writing a book, those elements.

Brad Weimert: So, let’s talk about that science. But before we get there, you said something a couple of minutes ago that I think is an important thing to hit on because it’s a point of clarity that people need. You said if an advertising dollar is going to give you ROI and sell product, why wouldn’t you spend? And yes, that’s a very good point. I think one of the things that becomes confusing and social for people is how you sell and how you convert. So, most people are steered away from creating content that it’s going to be an ad promoting a product because it’s hard to get virality that way or engagement that way to get people to watch. You and I grew up in an era skipping commercials if we could but really, we grew up in an era where you would walk away from the TV or something because you’re like, “Oh, sh*t, the commercials on. Let me get a snack and go back,” right?

Now, nobody wants to watch that sh*t. So, it’s creating the content that’s going to somehow promote the product at some point or it’s going to get top-of-funnel eyeballs, and then they’re going to investigate and buy. So, how do you reconcile content creation that’s an ad versus content creation that’s just there for engagement, for a channel to then lead to something else to sell?

Brendan Kane: That’s a great question. So, there’s a distinction of what happens through organic and what happens through paid. So, if we’re talking about organic, which what you said confuses a lot of people, they think organic is a channel to sell. Organic is a channel to get people to know, like, and trust you. And then from there, that can lead to sales. So, I’ll give you an example. We were working with a multi-generational leather expert, leather worker. So, he came to us with no social media experience, had 2,000 followers on TikTok, and he was struggling because what he was doing was showing videos of the handbags or the purses or the wallets that he made. It was just purely an ad. It wasn’t breaking through.

So, we worked with him on a format that’s called Is It Worth It? Where he would take like a $500 Chanel handbag, deconstruct it on the screen, and tell you whether it was worth the money you paid for it. So, there was no CTAs in any of that content. It quickly went from 2,000 followers. He just passed a million followers on TikTok, somebody with no social media experience. And in his content, all he’s doing is building trust and credibility, building a connection. And he just had a link in his bio and to that link in his bio, previously, he was using Google ads to generate traffic to his website. He would generate about 10,000 visitors a month just through the profile link on his TikTok with no CTAs in his content. It jumped to 100,000 visitors a month organically, sold out all of his inventory. Because when we know, like, and trust somebody, we ultimately want to take that next step.

Now, he’s at a point where he’s built up enough trust and credibility that he can layer in subtle calls to action into that content. But that’s the big distinction between kind of the organic and paid is people want to jump to, they want to jump before they have a relationship with somebody to making the ask. And like if you think about like telemarketers or people on the street that come up to you and ask you for money, you don’t know, like what is your reaction? You’re like, “I don’t know you. Why you’re asking me for that?” Versus a friend or somebody you know asks you, “Hey, can you do me this favor?” you’re more likely to say yes because you have that relationship built up.

Now, there are experts kind of on the paid side that have mastered kind of storytelling of how you build that trust and credibility and storytelling that can ultimately convert off of a cold audience doesn’t necessarily have to take a multiple frequency, but this is kind of the mistake that most people make as it pertains to organic because they treat like their social media profile, like it’s their website, and it’s just not. This is a communication tool to bridge and foster that connection. But once you do, it’s massive. Now, like you think of, for example, Kylie Jenner, she built this relationship through the TV show but then fostered it through social media. She built this relationship with millions and millions of women around the world. And then she became the youngest billionaire because she had this know, like, and trust element. She didn’t start out that relationship by saying, “Go buy Kylie’s cosmetics.” She built that trust and relationship.

Same thing you see like The Rock and this tequila company or to take an influencer, for example, you look at MrBeast. He spent ten years plus building his audience, building that trust and credibility, and then he launches Feastables. Then he launches Beast Burger and these elements. So, that’s kind of a big distinction I think people really need to kind of understand as it pertains specifically to organic. It’s like, “How do I get people to know, like, and trust me? And if people know they can trust me, they’re ultimately going to want to take that next step on that journey.”

Brad Weimert: So, through that lens, when we talk about paid, there is the idea, like you mentioned, of paid going direct to ROI. And then the other approach is paid going towards increasing that know, like, and trust brand and just building your size. So, two questions here. One is, at what point do you transition and say, “Hey, the content I’m creating is all about getting you to know, like, and trust me,” before I ever do a CTA? And is spending a bunch of money to build that in to get more followers, to get more engagement part of that strategy, or do you wait for the paid until after you get there?

Brendan Kane: I would recommend hold off, and I’m talking in terms of putting paid off of organic is hold off until you’ve demonstrated that you’ve built that relationship through. And it can be a single piece of content. Like, if you have a single piece of content that’s taken off and you’re seeing a meaningful impact on the business, like one video or organic video, without a CTA, can still sell a lot of product for you. It doesn’t necessarily have… People think that it has to have a CTA in order to have a direct correlation on a business objective and goal. So, what I recommend is until you’re starting to feel the impact on your business, hold off on paid. Once you start feeling the impact, whether that’s kind of DMs, people asking about products, people clicking on the link in your bio, like you mentioned vanity metrics before.

It’s like a metric is vanity to the business. Like us, as individuals, can’t look at a business or an influencer and say that’s a vanity metric because we can’t see behind the scenes in terms of how they’re correlating that into commerce. So, for you as the business, you need to have an honest look at the metrics. Maybe you’re generating a lot of followers, maybe you’re generating a lot of engagement, but is it progressing your brand? Is it progressing your business? Are you feeling that effect? If you’re feeling that effect, then yes, test, put, feel. You know, test by feeling more paid into the things that are working to see if you see that growth as well. But you as a business owner have to be able to kind of measure that and have a gut check.

Like, I did with my business. I started out with content creation for the first book, One Million Followers, but I didn’t have really the solid business foundation and structure in place. So, I took a step back and focused more on the business structure and getting all that going. And now I’m investing more time and energy into the content.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I guess what I’m getting at from that perspective is and that’s a good segue, because when you are heavily budget-constrained, when you’re a 0 to $1 million and you’re trying to figure out where the best use of capital is, everything you just said makes a lot of sense to me. But let’s say you’re at 10 million or 50 million. Is the advice the same? You wait until you see the bottom line impact to the company or do you spend money at that point to drive social presence to accelerate that flywheel?

Brendan Kane: From my experience, and again, I’m going to delineate between building social presence and using paid for conversion. So, in terms of building social presence, I don’t care what size of business you’re in. If you’re not feeling the impact and you don’t feel like your content is dialed in and it’s having an impact on your bottom line or whatever KPIs you’re looking at, paid is not going to fix it. You need to learn to become a better storyteller. Like, I’ve worked with multibillion-dollar corporations that spend $30 million a year on content, and they’re averaging like a thousand likes on a post. Like, the size of the business doesn’t dictate how good of a communicator you are in your ability to connect with an audience. Like, I know solopreneurs that are better content creators than billion-dollar companies that have huge teams.

So, I just want to make that distinction as like sometimes you have to crawl before you run. And it’s challenging sometimes with bigger organizations because you feel that pressure from the higher ups or the board or whoever it may be, that you’re having some level of success, whether it’s 10, 50 million, 100 million, $1 billion a year in revenue is that you think that you’re just going to spend your way through it. It just doesn’t work that way in today’s world. That’s a huge dynamic shift as it pertains to building an audience and building a relationship with an audience through these platforms, you need to learn how to communicate. You need to learn how to connect with these audiences so that you can break through. But paid is not going to fix it. All paid does is give you reach. It causes you to get your content in front of people. It doesn’t force people to stop and watch and retain that content.

Now, in terms of paid, that can be a different story. If you have an engine that you can convert and you have the historical data and performance that show you can convert it, spend as much as possible until you break that model so you understand what that ceiling is. That’s a completely different dynamic. But as it pertains to building an audience, connecting with an audience, it’s less about money and budget, and it’s more about having the foundational elements of what it takes to tell a story in today’s new world.

Brad Weimert: Got it. So, what I heard basically was, and correct me if the message was different, was use paid if you have a solid CTA that’s going to convert ROI, actually get ROI. Don’t use paid to try to grow your social presence or brand. Work on your storytelling.

Brendan Kane: Yeah. To give you an example is like I’m working with some of the best kind of paid marketers in the world that are looking to build their social presence right now, and they have no clue, but they are like the best in the world of like running paid ads to cold to converting. But they’re sick of having to overextend themselves on pay, and they want to learn how to build an audience but it’s a completely different skill set. So, they’re kind of almost starting from scratch in that perspective.

Brad Weimert: So, let’s talk about the content creation itself then because one of the things that I see you do often is break down different ads, different videos, and talk about what makes them good or what makes them effective, which is an interesting format in and of itself. But what are the elements and what are the elements of a good story or a good narrative? And how do you think about putting those things together when you’re creating content?

Brendan Kane: Yes. So, our whole business is based upon kind of this principle. What I’ve kind of seen as the big gap in the marketplace is two things. One, the market is heavily quantitative-focused, meaning they’re looking at views, click-throughs, reach, engagement, shares, likes, comments, things of that nature which is a good indicator if something has worked or doesn’t work. However, it doesn’t explain the why. Something got a million views and something got 10,000 views. Why? Quantitative doesn’t answer that. The second element that people really get wrong is they only look at their own content. Let’s just say you’re stuck at 10,000 views a video is like, how is studying your own content going to teach you how to break through to that next level? So, the model that we’ve spent about six years building, investing millions of dollars to kind of really solidify this is based upon qualitative analysis and research. And you use the word format.

So, what we do is we look at specific storytelling formats and specific platforms. Now, there’s hundreds of these formats out there. Like, to give you an example, one, you’ve probably seen on Instagram or TikTok. We call it two characters, one light bulb. It’s where the person plays the expert and the novice. They play the same person and they break down a common myth. They debunk a common myth. They go back and forth. So, that’s an example of a format. So, that format has been used for many different industries and subject matter. It’s used for finance, for legal, nutrition, real estate. Any of these things can be put into that format. So, we know with format, it’s not really about the content. It’s about the context. So, how do we unveil the context? How do we understand it? So, what we do is in our qualitative research process we call it gold, silver, and bronze.

So, what we do is we take 5 to 10 of the top performers. In that format, it can yield like 10 million views plus. Then we look at what we call the silver, the average performers, which is probably like 500,000 to 1 million. And then bronze, the underperformer, is like less than 100,000 views. And we take about 5 to 10 of each. And what we’re looking at is what’s happening in those high performers from a contextual nature that’s not showing up in those underperformers. So, in terms of kind of dissecting this, we look for what’s called performance drivers. These elements that increase the potential of that format, going viral and elements that decrease it from going viral. So, we’ve done kind of analysis of 200 formats. We have over like a thousand performance driver key findings. These are things like pacing, tonality, facial expressions, body cues.

What happens in the first three seconds? Are they using captions? What types of captions, title cards, thumbnails, all these nuances that kind of help contribute to the successful use of that format? Because what we see oftentimes is people, and I’ve even seen it happen with our format, some people will look and see a format that’s generated millions of views and they’re like, “Oh, I know what that person’s doing. I’m going to do it.” And 99% of people fail at doing it because they’re not understanding kind of the elements that contribute to the successful use of this. To give you an example of where I started my career is making a movie. Every movie for the past 80-plus years has used what’s called the three-act structure of how they tell the story. Every film uses it.

However, most moviegoers, they don’t know that that’s happening but they’ll go down and watch a movie one day and say, “That is the best movie I’ve ever seen,” and another day they’ll sit down and be like, “That is the worst piece of garbage I’ve ever seen.” But they’re both using the same format and structure. So, what’s the difference? Well, it’s the acting. It’s the dialogue. It’s the directing. It’s the cinematography. It’s all of these elements. It’s not really the content itself. It’s the execution of that content. So, that’s a big part of kind of we’re looking at it from almost like a filmmaking perspective of analyzing all of these elements to understand what are the contributing factors that help tell a good story through a format versus what are the elements that we need to avoid in using that format to express the message that we want to get out into the world.

Brad Weimert: I love it. So, first and foremost, be thoughtful in your approach to content creation as opposed to just turning the camera on and going. And there is a question in here, which is, at this point in the game, is it quantity or quality? And I think the answer that you just gave is it has to be quality. Is there anything to be said for quantity at this point?

Brendan Kane: There is once you’ve mastered it. Like, to give you an example, MrBeast who’s the biggest influencer in the world, when he’s starting out, he’s doing a video every like four to six weeks. But I think it was like last year, he said, “In 2024, I want to ramp it up to a video every week.” He can do that because he spent ten years plus mastering every nuance of it. So, once you’ve kind of become a master of your domain, master of your format, and you understand it, then you can make that decision to make that jump. But people are kind of and there’s just a lot of misinformation out there because back, let’s just say ten years ago when there were less people on the platforms, less content, the algorithms did favor frequency because they wanted people to produce more content for retention.

But as it’s kind of matured and what we see today, there’s just so much content out there that the algorithms have so much content to choose from that they’re not just going to favor you just because you post content. They’re going to favor you when you can grab and hold attention. So, frequency definitely can play a role once you have proven that you understand the nuances of it. But I mean, you’ve really got to prove your ability as a storyteller before you move to that level.

Brad Weimert: Still don’t put out bullsh*t.

Brendan Kane: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: When there’s a new feature on a platform, and sorry, I’m going to go down a rabbit hole here a little bit but platforms introduce new features on a fairly routine basis, and they seem to favor people that use the new features. Is that an exception to the rule? Would you run to the new feature to test it and to see if you can get more reach? Or do you still say, “No, no, no, I got to dial in the basics before I ever even bother touching the new features”?

Brendan Kane: So, let’s just kind of break down an example, Instagram Reels. So, when Instagram Reels came out, Instagram designed it to compete against TikTok. So, Reels, in the beginning, was easier to have success because there were less people producing content for that specific feature. It wasn’t that Instagram, I mean, Instagram was giving reach to it because they’re putting in new placements, but it was easier in the beginning because there’s less people creating content for it. However, the same principle still applies. Instagram I think it’s close to 2 billion people. Like, even if there’s limited number of people using it, it’s still a significant amount of people producing content for that. And sure, you can jump into something early and probably capture a wave. It’s not guaranteed if you’re not communicating effectively, but relatively quickly in kind of the model that we built is focused on this is relatively quickly you can understand like what are the formats that are working for Reels, and why are those formats working so that you can glean those insights and become a masterful storyteller so that you can have the quick win, but also sustain.

Because what you’ll see is a lot of people will gain momentum by jumping into something early, but then they’ll fall off a cliff because then they’re competing against with the masses, and their storytelling doesn’t hold up to it. So, it can but I think the important thing also to know is like every feature that’s introduced isn’t going to win. So, I’ve seen people I remember when Clubhouse first came out, I knew a lot of people, even very successful people, they were spending hours a day on this thing, and then the whole thing fell apart. So, there is benefit to be had of jumping into something early but I would still recommend set the foundation for yourself and understand what does it really mean to use this new feature to tell a compelling story.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think there’s something to be said for who you are as an entrepreneur and what your general M.O. is in following your own structure and your own patterns, right? For me, I am the type of entrepreneur that is waiting for something that I can invest in as opposed to try, right? I don’t want to try a sh*tload of things and have this shotgun approach to see what might catch wind, right? I want to invest in something that I know has a proven track record and that people are succeeding on, as opposed to being the first to test something out and have a little ego stroke by being the first there. I want people to prove its success before I get there. And that might mean that I don’t catch first win but it means that I have more of a path to go down.

And one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you today is because you have a path to go down, right? You’ve spent a ton of time analyzing quantitative and qualitative metrics around virality and content production. And in this era of messaging, shifting, and storytelling being relevant and personal brand being relevant, all of that stuff is confusing for people. And so, having a structure and format is sort of the roadmap that I think structured entrepreneurs are looking for. So, you mentioned a bunch of different points that you look for from qualitative analysis. Let’s talk about kind of the rubber meeting the road there. For example, with your business with an agency, how do you personally think about the things that are important for your example and how you create content to serve your own purposes?

Brendan Kane: Yeah. So, there’s been kind of a big shift because you talk about new features, specifically with Instagram. Instagram is really kind of coming back in terms of a business tool, utility tool, in terms of being able to leverage content to generate leads. And I think that in the beginning of my kind of experiment. So, I didn’t set out to create Hook Point. I didn’t set out to create an agency. I didn’t set out to create a company. When I wrote One Million Followers, it was truly an experiment. I was a consultant at the time, and I’d been doing social media since 2005, but to me, it was just kind of a learning experiment. So, there was a lot of content that was being created without a business kind of goal other than kind of awareness to allow me to kind of share information through my books and speaking on stages and things of that nature.

But as kind of we built Hook Point and it’s continued to grow kind of organically to kind of fill this need in the gap, my time, energy, and resource has been really geared towards how do we provide the most value and information through our content, but how does it correlate directly to our business goals and objectives? Because as you know, as a business founder and owner, like our time is precious and I’m not an influencer. This isn’t the only thing I do. I have to kind of run a team, run a company at the end of the day. So, it’s very different than being an influencer that all you do is create content. And I have nothing against kind of influencers. Influencers are my friends and I really admire what they do. Someday I may kind of aspire to kind of do that full-time, but that’s just not the reality of where I’m at.

So, every decision that I make today of content is how is it adjacent to what we do. And that’s why you see those content breakdowns as like, is it the most viral content ever? No. It does pretty well, but it directly correlates to the DNA of what we do, what we feel is important, and the value we provide. And then especially with Instagram, with kind of these new AI integrations and being able to allow people to comment, to receive a DM and things of that nature, there is a direct kind of correlation that we can measure from organic content to lead and natively ingrained kind of CTAs in an authentic way that doesn’t come off like kind of a sales pitch. So, that’s how I look at for myself is like, if we’re going to spend because it’s not just me creating the content. I have a team of people that are collaborating with the scripts and sourcing content and things of that nature.

I need to kind of make sure that it is tied to kind of where we want to grow the business, and those goals and objectives. I’m not going to sit down at this stage in my career, in my business, and just create content to create brand awareness because our books have enough brand awareness. Like, am I the biggest person in the world on the marketing side? No, but I’m pretty kind of established in that space. For me, it’s really how do we help people, but how do we grow our revenue, our lead source with each piece of content that we create and use those learnings?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, I love that because that’s ultimately who I want to be talking to. That is the audience listening to this, right? These are not people that aspire, for the most part, to be influencers. These are people that have established businesses. And there’s a range, right? We’ve got people that have new businesses that are getting off the ground listening and then we have people that have very established businesses that are doing eight, nine, ten figures. So, where content fits in from that perspective, I think, is the game for most people. So, when you think about it, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the storytelling element and all these different things qualitatively as well as quantitatively, that if you’re talking to a client, you’re talking about how to structure their videos.

So, for the people that haven’t gone to see Brendan Kane’s content, Instagram is where I went to look at it before this. I encourage you to do that and see what we’re talking about. But for those that haven’t, can you break down kind of what type of content you put out and how you think about it specifically? Because I think that’s really helpful to have a concrete example of, “Hey, I have an agency that helps people push out viral content and grow social for the end goal of ROI for the company.” How do you think about making content to be in alignment with that brand and also accomplish that goal?

Brendan Kane: Yeah. So, one of the things that we talk about clients or talk to clients about that is really important is it’s called the generalist principle. So, again, going back to the algorithms, what do they want? They want content that can retain audience because then it keeps you in the platform longer. They can serve more ads. They generate more profit. But they want content that they can see to as many people as possible and retain that. So, our job as content creators from an organic perspective is how do we make our subject matter interesting to anybody while still subtextually playing to our core audience. So, in the specific format that I do is it plays to what we’ve been talking about, the qualitative analysis, where we’ll take a viral video and break down why it went viral.

So, we’ll take a video that generated 80 million views, and I’ll say, “Well, I’m going to tell you exactly how it went viral.” Now, almost anybody could be interested in the fact of why a video got 80 million views. Now, I’m not expecting if 2 million people watched that video, that all 2 million people are my core audience. Maybe it’s 10%, but 10% is 200,000 people. That’s a lot better than me creating a very niche-specific subject matter and talking about qualitative analysis that may get 5,000 views. I’d much rather have 200,000 views out of 2 million that are my core audience than 2,500 out of 5,000 views. So, the way that we look at it, and this was the same thing with the leather craftsman that I mentioned, is anybody would be interested in seeing whether paying $500 for a Chanel handbag is worth it by deconstructing on screen. Like, I’m interested in watching that, but I don’t buy $500 Chanel handbags.

So, it’s kind of this balance of how do we make our content interesting to anybody, but still staying true to kind of what we are as a business and how does it correlate to us? So, again, we’re breaking down the qualitative elements of why a video got 80 million views and opening people’s eyes to the fact that there is a science behind virality, and we just know that a percentage of those people are going to want to kind of learn more and go further down kind of the path in potentially engaging with us right now or maybe in the near or distant future.

Brad Weimert: I love that. And I think that I mentioned this before, but the framework associated to that, the generalist principle is a valuable thing to latch on to. One of the other frameworks that I’ve heard you talk about are the six different ways that people perceive the world and how that plays into creating content. Can you dig into that a little bit?

Brendan Kane: Yeah. So, we have access to a proprietary data set that’s based upon 1.6 million communication assessments done worldwide. And what it does is it shows us there are six different ways that people will perceive our content, perceive our brand, and that will either cause them to be motivated or demotivated to take the action that we want them to take. So, the largest subset of the population is feeling-based. This is 30% of the population. So, they’re going to make a decision. They’re going to connect with our content, share our content, buy our products or services based upon how it emotionally makes them feel. The second largest subset of the population is fact-based. This is 25%. So, for them, it’s not about feelings and emotions. Does this make sense? They want information, time frames, data. Who? What? When? Where? Why?

The third largest 20% is fun-based. So, for them, it’s just they want to be stimulated. They want to have fun. Like, if you think about like Robin Williams, he was like always reacting to things like having fun and doing things like that, reacting to the world around them. 10% is reflective based. We call this imagination. So, these people really reflect on the world around them. If you’ve ever read a biography about Albert Einstein or even saw him in the movie, Oppenheimer, what is he doing? He’s staring out, staring at a pond. People kind of think that these people are just zoning out, but they’re actually reflecting in everything around them.

Another 10% is value-based. For them, it’s do I trust this brand? Are they committed to me? Are they dedicated? And then the last 5% is action-based. So, they want to move fast. They want the bottom line. They want the best. Have you ever seen Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible? He’s not feeling. He’s not thinking. He’s not having fun. He’s jumping off the side of buildings. He’s hanging off the side of planes. Like, incidents is their psychological motivator. So, as individuals, we have access to all six but we have our strengths and we have our weaknesses and the challenges as a content creator without a level of awareness, we are typically designing content and communicating based upon our strength. So, for me, my strength is logic but that’s only 25% of the population. If I only speak in logic, I have the potential to disconnect and alienate 75% of the population.

So, again, it doesn’t come down to kind of the content. It comes down to the context of how we’re representing something. So, to give you an example, I was brought in by a guy named Gary Keller that founded Keller Williams Real Estate Company, and we did analysis of kind of how houses were sold. And what we noticed is that it’s predominantly all thoughts and logic. It’s this house has five bedrooms, four bathrooms on an acre of land. That’s just data, information, and time frame. So, how would I take this content of a house and diversify it and these six different ways? Well, so start out with the logic because that’s 25% of the population. “There’s this house at five bedrooms, four bathrooms on an acre of land but imagine yourself sitting around this fireplace on Christmas Eve.

How is that going to emotionally make you feel when your whole family is there opening up presents? And did you check out the pool in the backyard? You are going to have the craziest and funnest parties and all of your neighbors are going to be super jealous. And I firmly believe that this is a great house for your family because it’s in the best school district. But I highly recommend that you move fast now because this is the best house on the market and it’s going to move really quick.” So, again, I just take the same content of a house and just dynamically shifted the language to make sure that I’m hitting the different ways that people perceive the world. Now, if you want a cool way to kind of look at how this is integrated, Pixar uses this in all of their scripts.

So, go watch a Pixar movie like have you seen, though, a perfect example is Inside Out with all the characters in the girl’s head. It’s like each character in the girl’s head represents the different ways that people perceive the world. So, it’s all about balancing that level of communication to make sure you’re not alienating a percentage and falling flat.

Brad Weimert: So, is the goal to try to wrap all six of those into one piece of content? Or is there a use case for creating content that is just speaking to one?

Brendan Kane: It’s a great question. Typically, we say focus on the big three: feelings, facts, and fun because that’s 75% of the population. Values and opinions can be very difficult because most people don’t want to hear others opinions. They feel like they’re being preached to. And you can integrate it but it can be challenging or difficult. The reflection-based, they typically don’t communicate effectively externally but you can direct them. And then action-based, you have to be the 5%, they typically kind of just tell people what to do and that turns off a lot of people. So, if you’re designing content that’s going to the masses, we don’t recommend just designing a specific piece of content to a specific way that people perceive the world.

If you’re doing one-to-one and then you know a specific person that you’re trying to connect with in a business development deal, and you know they perceive the world in a specific way, then I would do it. But one way that we do kind of play around with it is the disbursement of energy. So, in different scripts, we may start out with logic and then go to feelings and then go to fun. In other scripts, we may start with fun and then go to feelings and logic. So, we’ll have a script and we’ll have them color-coded and we’ll break down kind of the percentages and test. Especially with paid, we’ll test kind of different disbursements and leading with different ways to perceive the actual content that we’re talking about.

Brad Weimert: That’s interesting. So, basically, take the same piece of content, the same three elements that you’re working on, and then reorder them and see which one is going to hit harder.

Brendan Kane: Yeah. Like, we’ve started working in the legal space and working on class action lawsuits and acquiring claimants. And to get a good indication of kind of what the personality structure is, we’ll always be playing around with those disbursements to see kind of what the base audience is perceiving that’s driving the highest conversion. And we’ll just kind of keep testing those elements. It’s basically the same script. It’s just we’re changing kind of the order and kind of changing the language slightly to kind of see what the difference is.

Brad Weimert: I love that. Yeah. I mean, that goes back to kind of structure and format, but that’s a great one for split testing that I think people frequently don’t think about or don’t use. When you’re split testing stuff, there are a million things that you can try testing from colors to language, etcetera, but using this framework, the six ways people perceive the world and reordering the elements to hit emotions or facts first or second, I can see that being super valuable based on different markets.

Brendan Kane: It definitely is because, again, most people are challenged not with the content, but the way that they’re representing the content that causes it to fall flat.

Brad Weimert: Okay. So, a couple of quick questions before we wrap here. You started on Friendster and Myspace, which dates you and I because I was there. There’s an ever-growing pool of these new platforms that pop. And like TikTok is a great example because that sh*t popped fast and became super relevant. Yet there’s still a sh*tload of people on Facebook. And generation to generation, you get different adoption of these platforms. Talk to me a little bit about how you look at Facebook versus Instagram versus YouTube and where to spend your time and energy on creating.

Brendan Kane: Yeah. So, first off, TikTok didn’t grow as fast as people think it did because it was Musical.ly before it was TikTok and it kind of grew. It felt like it came out of nowhere but it was around for quite a long time. And I think it’s a really valid point because… And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier as like, should I be focused on an early adopter? As you pointed out, you look at Facebook and YouTube and Instagram or WhatsApp. They’ve been around forever and people are scared because of what happened to Myspace and Friendster. But the reality is Myspace and Friendster didn’t really know what they were doing. You know, they invented the space, but they didn’t really kind of understand what social media was all about, and that’s not their fault. I mean, they paved the way for all of this and we should all thank them for it.

But people kind of underestimate the level of sophistication that is in social media today. The level of behavioral science that goes into retaining audiences is so sophisticated that there’s this urge to say that new platforms come up and are going to unseat the big ones. But the reality is, I’m not saying it can never happen but it’s not as frequent as people would think. So, specifically to your question, like the first place that I always start is format-specific. Is there a format that you really connect with? Like, you said yourself, it’s like I don’t want to just test a bunch of things. I want to see something really kind of dig in and invest the time and energy into it. And we always say choose the format that you really believe in that you connect with that you’re like, “I really like that format. I think it’s right for my personality, for my message,” and then go from there as like, “Well, which platform delivers the highest performance in that format?”

And typically, people choose a format based on the platform that they consume the most on. But this has to be really an enjoyable experience for you or a learning experience for you. And it’s very difficult for you to learn anything if you’re not an actual user of the platform itself. Now, some people have a team and they don’t need to kind of invest in that level, but it really kind of starts down to kind of what is the storytelling format that you want to use and then design everything from there in terms of kind of the platform that you choose to execute that on.

Brad Weimert: Well, you wrote a book called One Million Followers that I encourage people to check out, How I Built a Massive Social Audience in 30 Days. Was that audience on Facebook and Instagram when you did that?

Brendan Kane: So, I did Facebook first and then I did Instagram, and then we built the entire model what we call the viral content model. And that’s been leveraged to generate about 60 billion views, 100 million followers, and a billion in revenue. So, it’s not like we kind of point at my example and just be like, “Oh, we’ve done this one time and had success. So, we’re going to share it with everybody.” We’ve proven this against pretty much every industry and sector. And I don’t know when this is going to come out but in June, my next book, The Guide to Going Viral that breaks down this model in depth, will be out.

Brad Weimert: I love it. That’s great. And that’s definitely noteworthy. I asked because Facebook, when I talk to clients today or anybody, I don’t hear anybody say, “Hey, I want a million followers on Facebook.” Everybody’s focused on other platforms. Is there a use case in benefit for growing an audience on Facebook today in 2024?

Brendan Kane: Absolutely. I mean, I think there’s close to 4 billion people on Facebook. I think that the better question to ask yourself is and it’s kind of counter to the initial title of the book, and it was happening at the time of the book too. It’s just I chose that title because people aren’t enamored with followers, but I would focus less on the followers and more on your ability to create viral content. Viral content will build the followers but viral content shows that you know how to connect with audiences because just because you gain a follower doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to reach that follower. And I would just say that if you master any platform, the true potential of that platform, you’re going to have more business you know what to do with. So, if you want to be on Facebook, you like that platform, you want to grow on it, by all means, do it.

You know, YouTube, I would say, is probably the most valuable if you can master long form because long-form obviously builds a greater connection with an audience but long-form also creates a little bit more challenges in terms of the storytelling dynamic because you’re holding attention for 10, 15, 20 minutes versus 30 or 60 seconds but again, it’s like if you master any of these platforms that have scaled, you’re going to have more audience than you know what to do with.

Brad Weimert: Today, what are the biggest mistakes that you see people making when they’re creating content?

Brendan Kane: That they don’t see that there’s an actual science, that there’s actual storytelling mechanics, that they’re basically just creating content, putting it out there and it’s not working and they don’t understand why. So, that is the biggest thing is really going in and understanding that you have to become a masterful storyteller, like any medium in the history of humankind to master it.

Brad Weimert: Love it. Brendan Kane, I appreciate the time. You’ve got two books out that have been out for a while now, One Million Followers: How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days, Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World, and you’ve got a new one coming out. You want to plug that one, one more time?

Brendan Kane: Yeah. It’s called the Guide to Going Viral.

Brad Weimert: Love it. Is there anywhere else that you want to point people if they want to find out more about you or the agency, etcetera?

Brendan Kane: Yeah. If they want to go to HookPoint.com, they can dig into a little bit deeper into our methodology, our process, and how we work with clients.

Brad Weimert: That’s awesome. Well, I appreciate you carving out time. Thanks so much.

Brendan Kane: My pleasure.