Whatever you do, do not read this.

One of the quickest ways to get someone to do something is to tell them not to.

This is because the most annoying thing for a human being is a door that can’t be opened or a story that’s left incomplete. We naturally want to resolve things to make sense of the world.

All good stories play on this with artful manipulation of information to create curiosity gaps - the spaces between what we know and what we want to know.

This is why Game of Thrones always ends on a cliffhanger. It’s why we can’t stand songs that end like this and it’s why clickbait works. We just HAVE to know when we’ll die based on our favourite 90’s foods!

Curiosity gaps will always intrigue humans because we’re programmed to see patterns and to do this we need resolution, but humans are also very good at learning and adapting.

Trends are now showing a decline in click rates of headlines that say, “you’ll never believe what happened next!” because we’ve been duped or lied to too many times.

Lately, the better performing headlines are the ones that explain what their content is in such a way that makes you want to know the whole story.

The key is to give the casual scroller a reason to trust you, something substantial before inviting them down your alley of the internet.

Curiosity Gaps, the art of creating great content, and what makes people care, and share are all topics discussed in a brand new course on Social Media from social@Ogilvy and their enigmatic global MD Thomas Crampton. This short online course is a masterclass for people and brands on how best to navigate the world of digital marketing.