The Black & White Idea Framework

The more remarkable your idea, the more potential views it will get, BUT ideas are worthless if they can’t be executed right.

That’s why it’s so to important always have a strategy to manage attention. On YouTube, I do it the following way in 4 steps:

Step 1: Catch Attention
Step 2: Hook it
Step 3: Retain it
Step 4: Convert it

Obviously, the more attention you catch, the more attention you can funnel into the next steps; that’s why this framework focuses on the “Catch Attention” step without neglecting the other steps that follow.

When it comes to catching attention and picking my ideas, my first focus is on the idea ingredients, not on the idea itself. Let me explain.

We all know that there are 2 categories of ideas:

Bad ideas
Good ideas

BUT something that most creators don’t know is that there are 2 subcategories of good ideas, that I call:

Layered Ideas: Complex, multi-dimensional and hard to convey with simple words. Effective to enjoy the content (keep attention) but not to catch attention.
Black & White Ideas: Can be broken down into binary in less than 60 characters and benefit from that concise format to catch attention.

Essentially, the difference lies in the complexity. One can be understood with a few words without losing the substance while the other cannot.

Here’s how I did in practice with Mrs Watanabe. I first start with a short description from ChatGPT and see if I can come up with a black & white title:

As you can see, I managed to keep the very essence of the story, broken down to binary in only 49 characters. I also applied the same concept to the thumbnail with only 2 elements:

The Japanese Woman: It took me hours of prompting on Midjourney to get that innocent look with a deep and confident gaze, suggesting she’s up to something. The goal was to visually illustrate in less than a second the: “Japanese Housewives Outsmarted” part.
280 Billion: This figure represents the collective impact of these Mrs Watanabe, as it is huge it keeps the credibility of “Global Finance” high.

On the other hand a layered idea broken down to binary would loose so much substance, that the black & white version would become far less interesting.

For example: Pension Fund Underfunding and Economic Security

While the topic is interesting (if you understand the stakes), as you can see below, it's very hard to break it down into binary and less than 60 characters without losing a lot of crucial information:

Now back to the attention management framework (catch/hook/retain/convert) the beauty of a black & white idea is that it acts as a bridge to flow attention to the next steps.

Thanks to the binary nature of the packaging, the viewers will be left thinking, “What’s the nuance behind that, if any?”.

If you want to see a live example illustrating that, here’s a 1 minute clip from Atrioc —a famous US streamer— that I highly recommend you watch.

Not only will you see everything you’ve read in this post play out live, but it’s a great reminder that attention is a zero-sum game and that your content is constantly competing against other videos.

(Pay attention to his tone of voice when he reads out loud "How Japanese..", that's a textbook case of "catch attention")

Now that you have earned that attention, “all you have to do” is deliver the nuance in the actual content.

But that ladies & gentlemen, is a post for another day 😉.

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