Video ad hooks - the ten openers, and how to pick one
The ten hook patterns in Admetra’s parts taxonomy, what each one is for, and how the first three seconds are decomposed when a trend video is broken down.
A hook is not a good first line. It is a beat with a job, a duration and a place in a structure - the 0-3 seconds that buy the rest of the video. Admetra’s parts taxonomy names ten hook openers and the set is closed, because a fixed vocabulary is what makes one ad’s opener comparable to another’s. The analyzer that reads each trend video writes a narrower slice of that set onto every beat, so an opener it has no value for lands on “other” instead of inventing a label.
The Ten Openers
Each pattern below has its own page: what it is, the situations it suits, and the situations where it costs you the stop. They are not ranked - the right opener depends on how aware the audience already is, how visual the product is, and what the beat after the hook can carry.
- Pattern interrupt - wins the stop with surprise, and owes the second beat a reason to stay
- Question - makes the viewer answer, which is participation rather than attention
- Bold claim / stat-drop - leads with the result and creates a proof debt
- Negative / warning - opens on the cost rather than the benefit
- Audience callout - does the targeting inside the creative
- Curiosity gap - opens a loop priced across the whole video
- Before/after tease - carries its whole meaning with the sound off
- Social-proof open - trades attention for borrowed trust
- Founder open - attaches the claim to a person
- Contrarian / myth-bust - a curiosity gap with a stake in it
How to Choose
Work backwards from the beat that follows. An interrupt needs a strong second beat to absorb the attention it wins; a claim needs a proof beat; a curiosity gap needs a payoff worth the wait; a contrarian open needs an argument it actually settles. The most common failure is not a weak hook - it is a good hook whose debt the rest of the ad never pays.
What Admetra Reads in a Hook
When a trend video is decomposed, the opening beat is not stored as a description. It is stored as a timestamped segment carrying the hook type, the mechanic family, the on-screen text and the spoken line where they are legible, the shot type, the camera move and the reason the beat works - which is what makes an opener reusable as a part rather than quotable as an example.
What Admetra Measures
- Hook openers in the taxonomy
- Ten, and the set is closed: pattern interrupt, question, bold claim / stat-drop, negative / warning, audience callout, curiosity gap (filed as curiosity / storytime), before/after tease, social-proof open, founder open, contrarian / myth-bust.
- Hook window
- 0-3 seconds. The hook is the only section whose definition leads with a clock window; every other section in the taxonomy is defined first by the job it does.
- Closed analyzer vocabulary
- Seven named hook types plus “other” in the v12 analysis contract, which is opt-in per invocation while the daily pipeline runs v8. A label the model returns that is not in the set normalizes to “other” rather than creating a new one, so the vocabulary cannot grow by accident.
- Default mechanic family
- Every beat tagged as a hook falls back to the pattern-interrupt mechanic family in the v12 analysis contract, which is opt-in per invocation while the daily pipeline runs v8, so the opener is indexed as an attention move before it is indexed as a message.
- What is captured per hook beat
- A timestamped segment with its hook type, mechanic family, on-screen text and dialogue where they are legible, shot type, camera move and a why-it-works line - stored as a reusable part rather than as a description.
- Emotions a hook is allowed to fire
- Four: curiosity, shock, fear and relatability. The taxonomy scopes emotions per section, and these are the only ones a hook beat carries.