Hooked

Part 2

Section 2Ignite thinking

Getting attention is just the first step in hooking your audience; attention is necessary but not always sufficient.

Consider how many faces you see each day, how many times you hear your own name, or how many sexual images you see. Yet very few of these encounters will carry through into any sort of long-lasting effect on memory or behaviour, despite catching attention.

For example, one experiment tested the effect of faces on the success of banner adverts, and found that – just like our cereal boxes from before – faces drew more attention, causing people to look at the ad for around four times as long; however, as can be seen in the chart below, recall for the ad’s message was significantly higher when the ...