HOOKS & ATTENTION
What happens in the first three seconds, and whether anyone is still there at the end: hooks, open loops, retention curves, pattern interrupts, payoffs and the reasons a good piece gets scrolled past anyway.
Call to Action
The single thing you want the audience to do next, stated once, in the place where they are most persuaded rather than at the end by convention.
Cliffhanger
Ending a unit at a moment of unresolved tension so that continuing is more attractive than stopping.
Cold Open
A scene placed before any titles, branding or setup, whose job is to establish a reason to stay before the piece formally begins.
Curiosity Gap
The discomfort produced by knowing that there is something specific you do not know, and the mechanism most hooks are built on.
Hook
The opening moment of a piece, whose only job is to make continuing more attractive than leaving.
In Medias Res
Beginning a story part-way through the action and supplying the context afterwards, so the audience is oriented by consequence rather than by setup.
Narrative Transportation
The state in which an audience is absorbed enough in a story that they stop evaluating its claims, which is why stories persuade where arguments do not.
Open Loop
An unanswered question deliberately left running so the audience carries a reason to keep watching into the next section.
Pacing
The rate at which new information, change or tension arrives, which an audience experiences as speed regardless of how fast anything on screen is moving.
Pattern Interrupt
A deliberate break in rhythm, framing or expectation, placed where attention is predicted to drop.
Payoff
The moment a promise made earlier is kept, and the source of most of the satisfaction an audience attributes to a piece.
Retention Curve
The graph of how many viewers are still watching at each second, and the only editorial feedback in video that is not an opinion.
Scroll Stopper
The visual property of a piece that arrests a feed scroll before any of its content has been understood.
Story Spine
A fill-in-the-blank sentence sequence — once upon a time, every day, until one day, because of that, until finally — that produces a causally connected story rather than a list of events.
Tone
The attitude a piece takes towards its own material, which the audience reads within seconds and uses to calibrate everything after.
Enough theory.
Bring us the launch and we will show you which of these terms is about to cost you a week.