The Science of Going Viral: Why Storytelling Beats Algorithms and AI

0:00Brendan Kane:AI is a tool, it's not a solution. And people think that AI is automatically going to make them go viral or have success. And the reality is, it's only as good as your understanding of how to use it. It's only as good as a data set, the prompts that you put in, and your ability to analyze the output of it. you don't win by following the playbook you win by rewriting it 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real no theory no fluff no shortcuts this is right about now with ryan alford what's up guys welcome to right about now we're always talking about how to get your marketing right now.

0:45We could talk about last month, last year, a year from now, we could look out too far, but we get you nowhere you need to be. You need to be living in the here and the now. That's why we have author Brendan Cain. I've got his book right here. It's the most gorgeous white I've ever seen. It is the guide to going viral. It makes me think back to my days with Steve Jobs and Apple. It's all white all the time, baby. The art and science of succeeding on social media. We're ready to succeed. What's up, Brendan?

1:10Brendan Kane:It's a pleasure to connect with you, Ryan, and everybody that's tuning into this. Appreciate your time. Hey man, appreciate your time. Appreciate the value that you're giving on social media. I'm gonna go ahead and plug him because I've been doing my normal research for guests and getting to know them before I get to know them. Brennan's putting out a ton of value. He's got these books. We're gonna talk about how to get his latest book. He'll mention that. But I wanna go and just tell you, just go follow him on Instagram. I went down the rabbit hole and 45 minutes later and seven bullet points of ideas I had from some things I'm doing.

1:39I'm like, wait a second. I'm supposed to be researching this guy, not just taking his wisdom. You got a lot of great insights, Brendan.

1:45Brendan Kane:I appreciate it. I'm fascinated with it. Even doing this for 20 years, I just love digging in and understanding how things work. The most successful people are the most curious people. You got to know how it works so that you can do it for yourself. But also, I just think it's what it takes to kind of go down the rabbit hole. It's so funny. I don't even have to say that anymore. So many people I talk to is like, you know, I have to know the way this works. I'm curious about that. It's a common attribute, right? Yeah, even things that I have no desire to get into as like a business or even studying.

2:13Brendan Kane:I just the minute I hear a subject, I'm like, how does that work? Peppering people for questions or just going online and researching as much as possible. We're going to get into the value that you bring in the books and how to make the mark on social media. But Brendan, I mean, like set the table for everyone. I mean, just so they know if they haven't heard of you, if they haven't stumbled upon your magnificent books or channels, what got you into this field? What does the audience need to know about Brendan Cain? So I initially didn't plan to get into social media. So it started back around 2003.

2:42Brendan Kane:So I wanted to be a film producer and I wanted to produce movies. And I went to film school. And what I thought was like, to be a movie producer, you need to know something about business. But I show up at film school and I quickly realized they don't teach you anything about business there. So I figured the best way to learn about business is start your own. And being a broke college student, I had to find the most cost efficient way to launch something. And at the time, and it still holds true today, was to start online companies. So I started a few online companies while I was going to college just to learn and experiment.

3:10Brendan Kane:And then when I moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to pursue a career in film, like everybody else, you start at the bottom. You're making coffees, deliveries, and just being an assistant, doing whatever they ask you to do. And like anybody, you want to stand out. You want to rise to the next level. You want to connect with studio executives, directors, actors. But when I had those opportunities and they asked me, why did you move to Los Angeles? And I would say, I want to be a movie producer. You could see everybody's eyes glazed over. I was just one of a million people with a pipe dream. So I knew I needed to take a step back and analyze how do I actually stand out in this ultra competitive industry.

3:40Brendan Kane:And I just noticed at the time we were spending all of our marketing budget on traditional television, print, billboards and things of that nature. And I also noticed every time we finished a movie, there would be a sense of anxiety and stress that would come over the office because we were investing tens of millions of dollars into a single piece of content. And this isn't like a normal business where you're building a brand where you have years or decades to get awareness. You literally have months for hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about this. And at the time, social media was just starting to come on on the scene.

4:09Brendan Kane:So I just went to the head of the studio and I said, hey, there's this new platform called YouTube and there's these people that are generating millions of views. There is no such thing as an influencer. And I said, I want to go off and engage these people to interview our movie stars that are in this movie. It was called Crank by Jason Statham. And he was like, I don't know if I want to do this. It sounds risky. I was like, it's not going to cost you any money. And the only upside is you're going to get millions of people to see your movie for free. So that kicked off what was the first ever influencer campaign on YouTube.

4:37Brendan Kane:And then I just kept continuing down that path, exploring these new platforms of social media and just growing and learning there. And I eventually just made the decision is like making movies is just another corporation. And I'm not a corporate guy. I'm an entrepreneur. And I just saw more upside and potential and just exploring social media and the growth that it was starting to take shape. when you're building a business the idea is only the starting point the real work is turning that idea into something customers can actually find trust and buy from we use shopify for a card shop and from a business standpoint that matters it gives us one place to manage the storefront products inventory payments checkout analytics and customer orders when you're trying to grow you do not want your system slowing you down.

5:24For us, Shopify helps make the buying experience feel professional. Whether someone is purchasing cards, sealed product, or merch, and when a customer is ready to check out, that process needs to be smooth. Less friction means fewer missed opportunities. And when that order comes through and you hear the Shopify, it's a reminder that the business is moving. Shopify powers millions of businesses around the world. from major brands to entrepreneurs just getting started. It gives you the tools to launch, sell, market, and grow in one place. Sign up for your trial today at Shopify.com slash Ryan. Go to Shopify.com slash Ryan, R-Y-A-N.

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6:48Something just hit me when you were talking, Brennan. More people need to think like movies. It's a really interesting comparison of the way people think. And I am an overtime brand guy. I really believe in that. But at the same time, when you have the desperation and the urgency of a movie, because you've got this point in time, you've spent all this time building this product, this thing, this wonderful thing you've done. And the way the movie cycle works, you've got this moment and you've got to sell this amount of tickets. You've got to put butts in the seats. And that urgency and creativity that comes when you have the right people thinking about it is a very interesting comparison to maybe giving someone a way to think about the way they should market whatever they're doing to kind of here and now make an impact.

7:33Brendan Kane:Yeah. One of the blessings of starting in that environment is you are forced to think as big as possible. Yeah. Because if you go in and start pitching an idea that's going to reach 10 ,000 people or 100 ,000 people or just a million people, you're going to get laughed out of the room. You can't survive on the limited kind of scope of like, we're just going to go after this small audience and it's going to lead to success because the stakes are just way too high. I'm thinking of a piece of content. If you haven't already done it, you got to think like a blockbuster movie as a brand. You know, it's a good hook.

8:01It is. I like that. You mind if I borrow it?

8:03Brendan Kane:Go for it. I'll footnote because of my interview with Brendan Cain and his brilliance in, again, how he creates virality and interest in YouTube. Hey, you were a YouTube OG back then. Back in 2005, nobody took it seriously in its first year. By the end of the year, I think it was like 8 million users, but it was like karaoke videos, pranks, and things of that nature. Nobody took it seriously. Nobody knew what it was going to become. Now it's over 2 billion people. And the latest statistics are crazy. 11 % of households in America have YouTube on their television. And that number is only going to grow.

8:38Brendan Kane:So literally, you have the power to create your own TV channel from your home. It's truly remarkable where we're at from where we started less than 20 years ago. YouTube is television now because of a smart TV proliferation and obviously the smartphone. You are your own walking TV station for whatever you choose. We've had this democratization of content. Used to be TV, giant media budgets. The only way to get seen and heard is if you're a celebrity or you can afford commercials. Now, with the proliferation of the app and smartphones and smart TVs, like you said, It's there for the taking, but you've got to do the right content.

9:14Brendan Kane:100%. And it's underappreciated what you just said. If we think back to pre-social media, how did we reach the masses? You needed to have television ads, radio ads, print. You needed to have a big marketing team, big budgets. And when you fast forward today, literally with this thing in your pocket, a mobile device, if you tell a great story, you can reach millions of people and not have to pay a single dime. We just had a client where we gave them a 500 million view award. And if you think about that, that's essentially five Super Bowl commercials. And how much does a Super Bowl commercial knock out the production budget?

9:46Brendan Kane:It's minimum$7 to$8 million just to get the 30-second spot. But now literally with a phone, a small business can reach that many people. It's truly democratized communication to the masses just to fundamentally understand and realize that the world that we live in is completely shifted to where it was before these platforms existed. And the fact that I agree is talked about a lot, but I don't think it's absorbed enough. But it's also the fact it's sort of even counter to what we're going to get into, which is how to actually make it viral and how to get as far as you need to for the market that you have.

10:19But why wouldn't you leverage this? Like, even if you got 20 people and it was free with your own time and sweat equity or something and creating that piece of content, that's what sort of blows my mind sometimes is the fact that there's still a lot of people that do not leverage this.

10:33Brendan Kane:I mean, if you just even think about it on the smallest scale, like think about like 200 people watching your content. Now, imagine the last time you went to a big movie theater, like an IMAX theater. You're standing in front of all those people that are paying attention to you. Or like some people think like 60 ,000 views is not a huge breakthrough. Think about the last sporting event that you were at, a stadium filled with people and they're listening to you. That is literally the power that you have in your pocket. And it's funny, I joke all the time because these numbers, like you said, they get thrown around and underappreciated for that volume.

11:04Anything like monetary, there are people talk about a million this, a billion that. I'm like, people just throw that around sometimes, like 10 million this, a billion that, much less what you're talking about. Even just 100 people in a room is a lot of damn people. And gotten desensitized a bit, I think, to some of these numbers for whatever reason.

11:21Brendan Kane:To be honest, like sometimes I have to take a step back too, because you're so immersed in it and you're always trying to push the boundaries of what's possible that you have. Because when you're looking at numbers on a screen, it's sometimes difficult to conceptualize that. So even for myself, I have to take a step back and kind of remind myself like the level of scope that we're dealing with. All these books are in the same territory. But talk to me about the guide to going viral. What are we getting here and what kind of guided the writing of this book? The past eight years, we've been developing a creative model from scratch.

11:54Brendan Kane:So myself and my team at Hookpoint. And basically, it built one of the first social media advertising companies when the ad platforms first started to launch. And we worked with Fortune 500 companies and we scaled to managing about 100 million a year in ad spend. And I just saw a tremendous amount of inefficiencies in terms of the creative process that goes into creating content for social media. So the first phase of it was, hey, we're just going to take our traditional assets, our TV assets, our billboard magazine ads, we're just going to put it on social media. And then it evolved to, we know that doesn't work, but we're going to still use the creative models that were designed pre-social media to develop content for social media.

12:30Brendan Kane:Seeing those mistakes happen time and time again, I was like, there has to be a better way to go about this. Over the past eight years, we've developed this creative model, which is the core premise of the book, and it dives deep into that creative model. Essentially, what we look at is what we call storytelling formats. So these are structures that have proven to succeed time and time again. And through the model, what we do is we show people how to identify these formats. But more importantly, how do we analyze these formats? Because just because you see a viral video doesn't mean you're able to create a viral video.

13:04Brendan Kane:So just to give you some examples, one format I'm sure everybody has seen that's tuning into this is man on the street. where you approach a random stranger on the street and then you engage with them. So there's an account called School of Hard Knocks where they approach successful business people. They ask, well, how did you make your first million dollars? There's a friend and client of mine, Alex Stemp, who is a professional photographer that approaches random strangers on the street, offers them a professional photo shoot. He's built an audience of 20 million people doing that. There's a guy, Body by Mark, that approaches fit people on the street and asks them, what is your fitness routine?

13:33Brendan Kane:With that format, very straightforward, you approach a random stranger on the street and interact with them. However, 99 % of people that see that format will fail in executing it because they don't understand what makes it tick. Meaning what we do with the process outlined in that book, like our team will spend anywhere between 15 to 25 hours analyzing what's the difference between a high performer in that format versus a low performer. And these are small kind of nuanced elements, the pacing, the tonality, facial expressions. What's the hook? The captions. Is there a perspective shift? Is there tension?

14:04Brendan Kane:Is there contrast? all of these storytelling elements that come into play. Another format that people have seen is two characters, one light bulb, where it's the same person that plays two different characters, where they're debunking a common myth about something. So there's Mark Tilbury that does it about finance. There's Erica Kohlberg that does it about the fine print in legal contracts. What happens when your flight gets delayed or your AirPods break? We have used this model. We spent tens of thousands of hours analyzing over 500 of these formats. And we have a team of researchers that's researching it every week.

14:34Brendan Kane:So what the book does is it walks you step by step through that model to understand that social media is not some mystery. Social media is very simplistic in that it's just another storytelling medium. It's another storytelling platform. And it's literally survival of the fittest for the best storytellers. Now, the reason I pointed out those two formats, if you think about Man on the Street, when was the first time that Man on the Street was introduced? Do you know? I was trying to think of that when you were saying that. We did it with Verizon Wireless back in the day, asking people about their cell phones.

15:04We had a radio campaign that was very successful in that. But this was in 2001.

15:09Brendan Kane:So the first time was 1954 for the first season of Tonight Show. So we're talking about a social media format that is generating billions and billions of views that was invented in 1954. The two characters, one light bulb. I don't know the official first person. It's hard to find the first person. But I remember watching the first Austin Powers movie, I think it was like 1997, where he's playing Austin Powers and Dr. Evil. So I say that because history keeps repeating itself. Human beings love structure. They love stories. The reality is, is civilizations have been built and destroyed based on stories.

15:43Brendan Kane:The first story started to emerge 30 ,000 years ago when the cavemen were putting cave writings on the walls and telling stories that way. Social media is no different. If you tell great stories, you will succeed. Now, there's so much information that people take you down the wrong track of like, oh, it's all about how much you post, what hashtags you use, what time of day. They're trying to find the hacks and the tricks and the things of that nature to game the system. But in reality, social media is just repeating itself in a new platform that allows people to tell stories. And that's all that you need to do.

16:16Brendan Kane:If you are a great storyteller, you will succeed. Ignore everything else and just focus on what is the ideal format for me and what will allow me to tell the best stories about what I want to represent for myself, my business, my brand, my message. When I think about some of the viral moments, it's one thing to sort of break them down after the fact and create playbooks. But how much of them are by accident? When I think about some of the best ones, I'm like, I don't know if they had virility in mind. Yeah, there's especially when TikTok kind of changed the game a little bit. There's a lot of people that go viral once or twice and get their 15 minutes of fame.

16:51Brendan Kane:Those people, I don't think they know what they're doing. I think the real success comes from when you can do it consistently. So if you look at somebody like Mr. Beast, he's not lucking into it. He spent thousands and thousands of hours into it. Or we talked about Mark Tilbury or Eric Kohlberg, Mark Rober, Channel Veritasium. What fascinates me, the reason we spent eight years developing this model and do so much research is I'm not really interested in helping somebody do it once because what are you going to do if you just go viral once? It's not really going to change the dynamics of things because as we know, people are going to move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

17:24Brendan Kane:The real challenge and the real possibility is how can you actually engineer it to your favor? How can you actually understand why something works? But more importantly, why something doesn't work so you can fix those mistakes and reproduce the results that you want. Yeah, that's the key because like you said, easy come, easy go sometimes and 15 minutes of fame is great. But what you see is a lot of people just never capitalize on it. They don't know how to recreate it. They're not ready for it.

17:57Talk with Brendan Cain. He is the author of The Guide to Going Viral, The Art and Science of Succeeding on Social Media. If you're watching us on YouTube, which you should be, you'll see this beautiful white book sitting here on the desktop, surrounded by his other two books. We've got Hook Point and 1 million followers. I couldn't believe you built up a million followers in 30 days. I didn't believe it until I kind of watched the video. I mean, how the hell did you do that, Brandon?

18:21Brendan Kane:So it started with me working behind the scenes. So I had spent 10 to 12 years of working behind the scenes of working for movie studios, professional athletes, celebrities, journalists, and everybody else at the time. There was no playbook for social media. So I was just testing things and what worked, what didn't work, things of that nature. And eventually it got to a point where I had tested so much. I had tested hundreds of thousands of pieces of content, started creating the foundations of the principles that were in 1 million followers and then following in the other two books. And one of the reoccurring things that kept coming up when I was talking to people, it's like, you know, Brendan, it's great that you work with MTV or Taylor Swift or Rihanna or Ikea.

19:00Brendan Kane:But that stuff is because their celebrities are ready because they have these big budgets. And I knew like, no, that's not the case. You can use it for anything. So I set out to kind of do this experiment with the knowing of turning it into a book. I initially just called the literary agent I knew. And I said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this experiment of generating a million followers in 30 days on myself. If I do it, will you sign me as a client and give me a book deal? And he said, yes. So basically, the whole kind of premise was an experiment. It wasn't about necessarily making me famous, turning me into an influencer.