GYoung Digital Blog

Grab their attention from the start, don’t let them get bored.

Recently I read an article about the importance of using a stellar first line in any communication in order to grab the attention of the audience right away. 

This article from Ad Age, The case for killer first sentences in strategy work, discusses how the opening line from any piece of work, whether it’s old literature or pitch decks used by agencies, should be treated with great respect and used as a tool to suck in the audience and hold their attention.

The best way to think about the opening sentence is how it’s used in literature – the very first thing that the reader sees can be so evocative and thought-provoking that the reader needs to know what happened next.

The example used in the article was pulled from George Orwell’s 1984. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Or perhaps the opening sentence from The Catcher in the Rye:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had be, and all that David Copperfield crap, built I don’t feel like going into it.”

One last example will be the example used from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer the electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

A more direct, sanitized, boring way that a marketer might write this might look like: “In 1953, in a world that was pretty unstable, she moved to New York for a job.”

The idea is to create the intrigue, get them to latch onto the sentence and create a clear, fluid thought process with an idea that they will resonate with, and will prompt them to follow the idea.

I’ve seen it happen all the time. I’ve seen audiences get fully engaged with a presentation, and I’ve been pulled into books because they were so well written, they grabbed my attention and I couldn’t stop, it just held my hand and dragged me along. Recently, I opened the memoir from Barack Obama, This Promised Land. I just wanted to see what the writing style was like, and how he communicates ideas. I intended to only read a sentence or two, but I ended up reading about 20 pages. The writing style was very fluid and engaging, I followed along to see how all the ideas came together. I’ve also seen this with presentations – Recently, I went to a pitch event, and one presenter had a great understanding of using provocative language to grab the audiences attention. He spoke with energy, talked about the potential to “earn billions,” and he spoke about legal firms giving him cease-and-desist letters due to the nature of his work. At the end, the audience asked him dozens of questions to learn more about his work, the regulations he’s dealing with, and how he’s going to accomplish his goals. It was the first presentation of the night that got the audience to become very engaged.

Strategic Thinking

This same thinking can be used in business communications, or any other formal communications; What’s the first thing the reader will see? How will you set the tone? What do you want your reader to think?

I approach this thinking with just about everything that I write. I consider what will be the first thing my reader sees, and whether it will catch their attention.

One of my favorite things I said to a manager during a freelance assignment was after rewriting some copy that I thought was incredibly boring, and I wanted to make it more fun to read. Then I said to my manager, “There’s no reason why a social media PR post can’t also be an 80’s action movie.”

I will stand by that idea to the death.

The same kind of thinking could be used in client calls, or in pitch meetings, research papers, creative briefs, or emails. What’s the first sentence the reader will see that will set the tone for the audience, what will grab their attention, what will make them follow along with the idea, and, perhaps most importantly, what will make them care. Will they care about what you have to say? If you kick off your meeting, and they’re already bored, they may not care very much.

This is especially important given that there are now so many new AI tools that will churn out endless slop every second of the day. It creates so much content, and copy, that is all just “good enough,” and it’s competent and will communicate whatever it needs to communicate. There’s so much content being pushed out there that it will be hard for anyone to break through and rise out above the slop. AI creates content that’s good enough, but it is it killer, God-tier work?

That’s the one thing that AI is missing, it’s the human element. It’s becoming easier to figure out pretty quick what’s AI and what’s real, and people are likely to skip past the garbage, or the boring. However, when they find that killer, opening line that grabs their attention, they will be much more likely to care.

*Note: Yes, I used AI for images, but I don’t have a graphic designer to work with, so, don’t give me crap.