The Killer First Line - Grab Their Attention and Make Them Care

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.

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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.

The Growing Need for Communicators and Writers

Originally published on Substack

With the job market being so completely messed up right now, this just might be the time to stop looking for jobs and simply create your own job. There’s an increasing number of former corporate tools who are leaving their jobs, whether they choose to or not, and going independent to great success.

In fact, there are some trends lately that suggest that this is an excellent time for creative professionals to sharpen their skills and get ready for a new wave of work.

Think of this era of mass layoffs less as the world falling apart, and more as a realighnmnt of what the world needs at the moment.

And it seems that the world needs a little creative thinking.

Shifts in the job market

It all came to a head for me over some buzz a few weeks ago that the guys over at Anthropic was looking for a head of copy and content. A copywriter, basically. A very well paid copywriter at that. A few other AI tech companies were doing likewise, searching for similar content professionals to join their team. Some pointed out the irony of companies that are building tools with the intention of replacing writers and automating the writing process entirely, they are hiring humans to do the writing for its own brand, at insanely high salaries. It’s suggested that there’s a strange disconnect that companies that want to automate certain tasks for everybody, don’t want to automate tasks for themselves, as if they understand the need and importance of human writers.

But that raises an interesting question, at what point in the writing and storytelling process does one find most valuable? Is there an element in the writing process that Anthropic understands that AI is unable to replace?

This all follows another trend that’s been making rounds over the last few months. It appears that there has been a great need for creative thinkers, writers, and storytellers as if there’s a sudden need in the market that’s not being fulfilled adequately. In fact, the Wall Street Journal took notice:

“The percentage of LinkedIn job postings in the U.S. that include the term ‘storyteller’ doubled in the year ended Nov. 26, to include some 50,000 listings under marketing and more than 20,000 job listings under media and communications that mentioned the term, according to the professional-networking platform.”

It was also pointed out that executives mentioned the word “storyteller” or “storytelling” 469 times throughout 2025, which is quite a jump compared to 359 times back in 2024, and a leap to the moon compared to 147 times in 2015.

This need for storytellers and creative professionals follows the general trend that’s been going on for the past few decades. The entire market has shifted, which might seem obvious now, but it appears to be contextualizing in a way that’s causing everyone to react accordingly. With all the independent writers and artists out there, with all the Substacks and Wordpress’s and social media accounts, brands aren’t able to keep control of the narrative. All it takes is one charasmatic personality on one of these channels to share an opinion about one of these brands that might catch on and send the narrative around that brand into a direction that they don’t want to go into. Or, a a group of smaller voices might come together and share the same opinion around a brand which builds momentum and that opinion becomes the defining characteristic around that brand.

For example, take Anthropic. Anthropic wants people to invest into AI. They need people to trust Anthropic and trust AI. At the moment, it would seem that at least half of people trust AI.

And then, of course, there’s the AI slop

Sated in the WSJ piece, “The AI slop of it all creates so much distrust, and they see that the brands that are winning right now are the ones that are most authentic and human and relatable,” said Steve Hirsch, CEO and co-founder of Hirsch Leatherwood, a New York-based communications firm.

There is so much AI slop out there, and there’s such a general pushback against this slop that using AI has become its own social stigma, to a certain extent, much like smoking, or kicking dogs. The last thing that some writers want is to be accused of using AI to create your work.

Let’s not forget how the suspicion of AI in creative work has been described as “McCarthyism.”

Or how it’s become the internet’s new favorite insult.

In fact, it’s reported that more than 20% of YouTube videos is AI slop.

Preparing for Next Steps

So, what to do?

What to do… what to do… what to do…

It appears that Anthropic and OpenAI are aware of this shifting dynamic. With Anthropic having filed to go public, and OpenAI striving for that same goal, and with so many other brands struggling to survive in this changing landscape, they all realize that they need smart, creative people to speak to communities. Since, after all, nobody seems to trust them.

For some, this suggests that there is a need for creative work, and for a lot of people, and for a lot of people, they’ll think that, hey, I have those skills, I’ve written for magazines, I know how to tell stories. This is exciting!

And yes, this is exciting.

HOWEVER!! It’s also important for creative professionals to keep themselves in check and not get too excited.

For starters, how competitive is this creative landscape, really?

How many writers and designers and musicians are there? Especially the ones looking for work?

Regarding the job posted at Anthropic, it’s been written about that this job isn’t necessarily a reason for creative professionals to get excited. Rather, it’s a sign that points into the direction that the industry is taking.

You can probably imagine that an AI company like Anthropic will still expect others to use AI to perform certain tasks, at least to some extent. That still may very well include writing tasks.

It’s likely that Anthropic is not going to hire someone JUST to write blog posts. Or social media posts.

Rather, they want to hire someone who is able to develop an entire narrative infrastructure where the blog posts and social media posts tie into each other in order to tell a larger narrative that’s appropriate to their respective channels.

According to The State of Brand, “The demand for people who can define a brand voice from zero, who can architect a narrative that holds across enterprise buyers and consumer users simultaneously, who can translate insanely technical AI products into language that moves a buying committee of six people who all want different things, that demand is surging.”

In other words, the boring, menial tasks of just filling out words on paper is being managed by AI, or other systems. Brands want big picture thinkers.

Though, there is another reason to be excited, because this space is only growing. Recenty, Gartner published a communications report which forcasts the next four years of comms strategies, and it made clear that communications has become more essential than ever.

I would love to try to interpret the report, but I’ll refer to this LinkedIn post which I think speaks to it better than I might:

What stands out to me: PR budgets are going to double. 2x increase in PR and earned media spend. AI search engines priotitize earned, organic, and owned content over paid. Earned media is the new SEO. Narrative intelligence is now a core capability. Communications is a core business infrastructure.

It would seem to me that given the way that the market is shifting, and given the needs of brands today, where the market is going, and what people actually want to do, it would make sense to me that we have a better understanding of where things are going, and what we should expect from this world.

But, as we’ve seen from the job market over the last few years, this all feels very moot. Like, who cares? Nobody’s hiring anyway, and there are so many people applying for the same jobs, so, who cares?

Well, that’s the part where we all need to get a little more active.

Yes, the job market is nuts, but that is not a new phenomenon. The job market has been nuts for years, even before AI was a part of the conversation.

Go and Do Likewise

So, what are we to do?

It’s easy: Brush off that blog and get to work.

Write in that substack.

Paint some pretty pictures and put it on Instagram.

Over the past couple years, I’ve become convinced that hiring managers don’t want “competent” people. After looking at my resume and education, you’d think that I’m the most talented and competent person in the world. However, nearly every job interview I’ve had, they always ask me about the content that I produce on my own. They want to know about my blog posts, my short form videos, my TikTok, anything else like that.

Though, perhaps this comes with age, but since many of my jobs haven’t required me to engage in a lot of these kinds of tasks, I was never able to give a very good answer.

However, there are plenty of people who do have plenty of experience in this area. They write in their blog, they post videos on YouTube and Reels, and they know how to build and command an audience.

Given the latest trends in this creative space, it’s about time to get to work and get ready.