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Tickle Their Brains
If I had to distill my theory about what's working for social media video in 2026, it'd be: tickle their brains 👉🧠
Make the audience think. Teach them something new. Reveal a blind spot.
One of the unfortunate effects of generative AI is that it seems to be devaluing impressive visuals. It's hard to tickle someone's eyes when their assumption is that AI did the heavy lifting.
So instead of the eyes, go for the brain.
When I scroll my feed these days, every other video is someone reading a Wikipedia fact straight to camera (the lazy version). Weirdly, it grabs my attention!
What just happened?
On Sunday night, I was struck by inspiration to create a fake behind-the-scenes video that somehow subverted expectations by merging into a single, trippy video. Lull the audience into expecting to see how A compares to B and then BAM, tickle their brain with C.
After a day of equal parts problem solving, filming, and editing, I put together the above video.
And let me tell you, IT WORKED. In the first 24 hours, it got roughly 30M views across all social media platforms.
As always, more Craighill
From a business/product perspective, Craighill are masters at tickling brains for the sake of sales.
Rather than selling you a pen, they go to great depths to teach you about why every other pen is terrible and how they've made a better one:
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