Guest
Dennis Hegstad
1 indexed appearance on the show — Brand Strategy, Paid Media, Consumer Trends, Product Development, AI
Appearances
Takes from the episode
Extracted from the full conversation — a take may be the cowboys’ or the guest’s. The clip link settles it.
2026-03-31 Paid Media
Businesses that end up near bankruptcy commonly share the same root cause: all of their traffic and media spend is concentrated in Meta with no other channel diversification.
There was a very common trend in the businesses that were having a lot of financial struggles... they had all of their media spend in Meta and they had no other channels.
▶ 44:25 2026-03-31 Brand Strategy
Because algorithmic reach has collapsed since 2016, brands now win by standing out and being individualistic rather than copying the safe, pastel, curated aesthetic everyone else uses.
2016, never harder to start a business, never easier to stand out. 2026, never easier to start a business, never harder to stand out. Which is the death of the millennial marketer.
▶ 18:25 2026-03-31 Consumer Trends
Gen Z's growing desire to escape attention-hooking algorithms is creating real market demand for analog, non-addictive physical products aimed at kids and young people.
There's a really big push right now with Gen Z where they're trying to push against the actual algorithms that are consuming all of their time that are hooking everything into them.
▶ 1:19:05 2026-03-31 Brand Strategy
TikTok's rollout of a dedicated short-drama feed is worth betting on now because platform-backed content formats tend to get algorithmically rewarded, so brands should start testing it early.
I think brands need to uh need to go with this. Spin up a spin up an alternate account and why not start testing it now? I mean TikTok is betting heavily on this.
▶ 1:10:25 2026-03-31 Other
Cheap 'lawsuit as a service' tools work as a business tactic because they inflict constant psychological pressure on a debtor until they settle just to make it stop.
Every second that they're thinking about your lawsuit, they are not thinking about their business... They're at dinner, lawsuit. They're at lunch... please lawsuit.
▶ 9:45 2026-03-31 Paid Media
New third-party research suggests Reddit is an undervalued ad channel where scaling spend actually lowers CPA and raises ROAS, defying the usual diminishing-returns pattern.
Fospha's The State of Retail Commerce 2026 study found that businesses that scaled their investment in Reddit saw cost per purchase improve by 34%... increased ROAS.
▶ 1:01:45