How to Hook Attention
The 3 traits you need to hook someone's attention in 3 seconds
“The test of an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch – not opposition, but indifference.”
– Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid
Edwin Land said it better than I could. The greatest problem for a startup is not lack of money, nor fierce opposition.
The real problem is obscurity – people not knowing that you exist.
In my last essay Vivid Storytelling – How Great Founders Turn Bystanders into Believers, I wrote about how you can leverage the power of stories and visual words to get your message across.
However, if you can’t hook people’s attention to begin with, you never get the chance to tell your story.
So how do you hook people’s attention? How do you get people to turn their heads, hang on to your every word, and fan the flames of publicity in your honor?
The answer is the FaMEx formula.
FaMEx – The 3 traits that hook attention
FaMEx is an acronym of 3 traits:
Familiar
Mysterious
Extreme
I came up with the FaMEx formula after studying countless of headlines, marketing tactics, and story plots. Eventually, a pattern began to emerge. The ones that succeeded at hooking people’s attention shared the 3 FaMEx traits – while the ones that failed didn’t.
Let’s dive into what each of these 3 traits means, and why they matter.
1. Familiar – Make a subject relatable and relevant
Familiarity ensures people can relate to the subject, and that it plays a relevant role in their lives.
When a subject is not familiar, people either:
Lose interest – as they can’t relate to the subject nor see how it’s relevant to them
Feel confused – as they can’t connect the subject to any existing knowledge
Familiarity has one more benefit: we like things the more familiar they are to us. There are two psychological effects behind this:
The Endowment Effect: We get more attached to things we create, nurture, and have in our possession.
The Mere Exposure Effect: We grow to like things the more frequently we are exposed to them. When the Eiffel Tower was first built, many artists left the town in protest against the “gigantic black factory chimney”, “this odious column of bolted metal.” Today, the French celebrate the Eiffel Tower as the very symbol of Paris itself. 1
The more familiar a subject is to us, the more we view it as part of ourselves. And subjects that relate to ourselves are the most interesting ones in the world.
However, familiarity alone won’t grab attention. We also need mysterious.
2. Mysterious – Evoke curiosity through the Q-A gap
“Mysterious” is what sparks people's curiosity in a subject.
A mystery is when your mind is occupied with a question, but you don’t yet know the answer. It’s in this gap – between question and answer – that curiosity rushes in to fill the void.
The question-answer gap is what keeps your attention glued to the pages of a great novel. A good storyteller builds up several mysteries that make you ask “What will happen next?” – drawing you into the magnetic vortex of the story until your questions are finally answered.
However, people will only get curious about subjects they can relate to. Your question must be an extension of a subject your audience is familiar with.
Familiar and mysterious are like the two teams of a football match. They set up the game. But to intensify people’s interest in the game, we need the 3rd trait: extreme.
3. Extreme – Intensify interest by raising the stakes
“Extreme” multiplies the appeal of the question-answer gap by raising the stakes.
One example is rock climber Alex Honnold, who in 2017 climbed a 900-meter vertical cliff with his bare hands and no ropes. His documentary, Free Solo, will make you sit on the edge of your seat as you watch him hang over the gaping abyss – a single misstep meaning certain death.
If you are extreme enough, that alone can create a question-answer gap. Extreme things make people go “Wait… WHAT?!” – and get curious to find an answer to the extreme outlier.
Richard Branson is a superb example of this. When he launched Virgin Cola, he rolled a Sherman battle tank onto Times Square – crushing Coca-Cola cans along the way. 2
An extreme claim must also be specific. So specific that people can instantly check and say if it’s true or not.
When you use vague words like “many”, “quickly”, “easy”, or “low price” – you lose the extremeness and the credibility of your claim.
To make a claim that’s extreme and credible, specify your description with a HOW:
As the advertiser Claude Hopkins said:
“If a claim is worth making, make it in the most specific way.”
Examples – How to combine Familiar + Mysterious + Extreme
Below are 5 examples that have combined the 3 FaMEx traits successfully:
1. “Read This or Die”
One example that brilliantly combines all three of the FaMEx traits is an ad for the Journal of Alternatives, which starts with the headline: “Read This or Die”. The body copy then follows with a bold but data-backed statement:
“Today you have a 95 percent chance of eventually dying from a disease or condition for which there is already a known cure somewhere on the planet. The editor of Alternatives would like to free you from that destiny.” 3
Let’s break down this ad with the FaMEx formula:
Familiar: ✅ “Death” is a familiar subject to any person, and it’s certainly high up on the priority list of things we wish to avoid. This makes the subject relevant to the reader.
Mysterious: ✅ Both the headline and body copy get the reader to ask questions: “What info could possibly be so important I might die if I don’t know it?” Most readers will be curious to learn more.
Extreme: ✅ The extremeness of the headline instantly grabs your attention. The life-and-death matter also amplifies the question-answer gap by raising the stakes.
When using a headline like “Read This or Die”, one must be very careful to not over-exaggerate. The claim has to be credibly backed by data, and also be relevant to the subject in the body copy, which this ad did superbly.
2. The 4-Hour Work Week
Another great FaMEx example is the name Tim Ferriss chose for his best-seller book The 4-Hour Work Week:
Familiar: ✅ Everyone is familiar with the concept of the work week. And working fewer hours is a very relevant subject for most.
Mysterious: ✅ The book’s title gets the reader to ask: “How can you possibly make a living working just 4 hours a week?”. This question-answer gap sparks one’s curiosity to learn more.
Extreme: ✅ Most people work at least 40 hours a week, and many as much as 60-80 hours. The audacity that it’s possible to work just 4 hours a week multiplies the power of the question-answer gap.
When naming his book, Tim Ferriss also tested many other potential titles, including The Wild Gooserace and This Sucks, How to Live Like a Druglord. 4 If we use the FaMEx formula, we can see why these titles failed:
Familiar: ❌ “Gooserace” is not a familiar subject to anyone. “Drug lords” is a bit better, but few people will actually want to live like one. Both subjects thus lack relevance.
Mysterious: ❌ The title The Wild Gooserace doesn’t get the reader to ask a question, so there is no mystery. The second title is better. But the most likely question this title will evoke is: “Why would I want to live like a drug lord?”.
Extreme: ❌ / ✅ The first title commits a serious flaw: it lacks specificity. It uses the word “wild”, but without a HOW to specify how wild. The second title is more specific, offering a clear HOW in “live like a drug lord”. But again, this title ultimately fails due to lack of relevance.
3. Quaker Oats – “125 million explosions in every cereal grain”
Breakfast cereal may hardly seem like the most exciting topic. But only to those lazy enough not to do their research.
Do enough research on any product, and you’ll find surprising facts that will amaze anyone who hears about them.
This is what advertiser Claude Hopkins did to come up with a hook point for Quaker Oats’ Puffed Grain cereal – leading to the headline “Food Shot From Guns”, followed by the statement “125 million explosions in each grain”. 5
Familiar: ✅ Everyone is familiar with breakfast and cereal.
Mysterious: ✅ The ad gets the reader to ask questions: “How can food be shot from guns?”, and “How can 125 million explosions possibly occur in a tiny grain of rice?”
Extreme: ✅ Both the headline and the 125 million explosion statement are specific and extreme.
4. Paranormal Activity – the power of suggestion
Can you create an extreme effect without actually making a claim – and on a shoestring budget?
Yes, by using the power of suggestion.
Suggestion means you only show glimpses and indirect effects of the real thing. As a result, people will imagine the real thing to be much more extreme than it actually is.
The horror movie Paranormal Activity is a great example of this. When launching the trailer for the movie, they barely showed any scenes from the movie. In fact, the movie’s slow build-up would have made the scenes boring if shown in a short-form trailer.
Instead, the trailer showed people’s fearful reactions as they were watching the movie.
Rather than showing how scary the scenes were – they suggested that the scenes were incredibly scary by showing people’s reactions to them. 6
Familiar: ✅ We all have experienced fear. And for those who enjoy horror movies, this experience is very relevant.
Mysterious: ✅ Watching people’s fearful reactions, you can’t help but wonder: “What could possibly be so scary to make people react like that?”
Extreme: ✅ The scenes themselves weren’t extreme. But by using suggestion, those who watched the trailer would imagine scenes much more horrific than the actual footage.
Another great example of suggestion is the movie Jaws, where the shark never makes any physical appearance in the first scenes. The audience only sees the indirect effects of the shark, making them imagine it as much more fearful. 7
5. “Buy stolen merchandise”
The budget company Consumers Hero created a stellar ad with the headline: “Buy stolen merchandise if you’re willing to take a risk”. The headline was followed by this body copy:
“We developed an exciting new consumer marketing concept. It’s called “stealing.” That’s right, stealing!
Now if that sounds bad, look at the facts. Consumers are being robbed. Inflation is stealing our purchasing power. Our dollars are shrinking in value. The poor average consumer is plundered, robbed and stepped on.
[Our concept is to] recycle “lousy rotten” garbage into super new products with five-year warranties.
We steal from the rich manufacturers and give to the poor consumer.” 8
Let’s break this ad down with the FaMEx formula:
Familiar: ✅ The concept of stealing is simple to understand, and the promise of saving money is always relevant.
Mysterious: ✅ The headline gets the reader to ask: “How can they possibly advertise stolen merchandise?”. We want to keep reading to find the answer.
Extreme: ✅ Advertising “stolen” merchandise is certainly an extreme statement, which only makes the itch to keep reading that much stronger.
Summary
The greatest problem for a startup is not opposition, but obscurity. If people don’t know you exist, nothing you do matters.
But to fight obscurity, you must first hook people’s attention.
To make an effective hook, use the 3 traits of the FaMEx formula as a checklist:
Is my hook Familiar?: Relate your subject to something your audience is familiar with – and that plays a relevant role in their lives.
Is my hook Mysterious?: Get your audience to ask a question about your familiar subject.
Is my hook Extreme?: Make your statement dramatic, and make it specific. Specify it with a HOW – HOW fast, simple, powerful – until people can say instantly if the statement is true or not.
While these 3 traits are present in any great hook, there are many different ways you can combine them. Some of these approaches include:
Pick a common subject, and flip it to an extreme: This is the approach of “Read This or Die”, “The 4-Hour Work Week”, and “Buy Stolen Merchandise”. They use subjects as common as water is to a fish – we hardly notice these subjects until they are pointed out. This makes the extreme flip that much more dramatic.
Mine your subject for surprising facts: This is the approach Claude Hopkins took to discover the “125 million explosions in every grain” fact about Quaker Oats cereal. Focus especially on how the product is produced, and what outcomes it can achieve.
Use the power of suggestion: Show only glimpses and indirect effects. Suggestion takes less effort from you, and your audience will dramatize your subject even more in their imagination.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. But I hope it can spark your creative flame.
What hook point is right for your particular case… I can’t say. As these examples show, every situation has its own unique hook. I can only leave you with this final piece of advice:
Make it familiar.
Make it mysterious.
Make it extreme.
Happy hook-pointing!
In my next essay, I will cover how to sustain attention once you got it
Thanks for reading,
Henrik Angelstig
Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World – by Brendan Kane
Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World – by Brendan Kane
Scientific Advertising – by Claude Hopkins
Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World – by Brendan Kane
The Adweek Copywriting Handbook – by Joseph Sugarman