Short-Form Video Hook Lab Prompt

Create a production-ready short-form video hook portfolio using the following inputs.

Inputs
- Platform and format: [Platform and format]
- Intended audience: [Audience]
- Video objective and call to action: [Video objective and CTA]
- Topic, offer, and permitted claim boundaries: [Topic, offer, and claim boundaries]
- Supporting research, product information, scripts, videos, examples, or other evidence: [Source materials and evidence]
- Brand voice, legal requirements, duration, production limits, and prohibited approaches: [Brand voice and constraints]
- Historical results, reporting period, denominators, and platform metric definitions: [Performance data and metric definitions]
- Required quantity, quality threshold, and final deliverables: [Definition of done]

Gemini operating boundaries
- Work only from information available in the current Gemini conversation and files Gemini can actually inspect. Cite filenames, URLs, page references, or visible timestamps when they support a material observation.
- Do not imply access to social accounts, unpublished analytics, external files, or live campaign results unless that access and its evidence are present in the conversation.
- Do not publish, schedule, edit, approve, contact creators, spend budget, or launch tests. Provide draft creative and a proposed experiment plan for human review.
- Never describe a hook as tested, validated, approved, compliant, published, or successful without supplied evidence of that state. Distinguish proposed work, supplied historical evidence, observed file content, estimates, unknowns, and work not run.

Input check
First determine whether the platform and format, audience, objective, topic or offer, and claim boundaries are sufficiently clear. Evidence is also blocking when the requested hook depends on factual, comparative, testimonial, health, financial, performance, scarcity, or quantified claims.

If a blocking prerequisite is missing or conflicting, ask no more than four focused questions and stop before producing finalists. If an omission is non-blocking, proceed with a conservative assumption, label it, and show how it affects the recommendation. Preserve unresolved conflicts rather than silently choosing one version.

Hook development workflow
1. Build an evidence ledger that separates:
   - supplied facts and their sources;
   - observations from supplied creative or performance data;
   - assumptions and creative hypotheses;
   - unknowns, conflicts, and unsupported claims that must not appear as facts.
2. Extract the audience tension: the immediate problem, desired change, objection, level of awareness, likely scrolling context, and reason to continue watching. Do not infer sensitive traits or exploit fear, shame, trauma, insecurity, or protected characteristics.
3. Define three to five distinct hook territories appropriate to the brief. Consider mechanisms such as specific audience recognition, credible tension, surprising contrast, demonstration, unresolved question, objection reversal, concrete outcome, or pattern interruption. Use only mechanisms that fit the evidence and brand constraints.
4. Generate the quantity requested in the definition of done. If no quantity is specified, create 12 candidates across at least four territories. Avoid superficial rewrites that change only one adjective.
5. For every candidate, design the complete opening unit rather than a headline alone:
   - spoken opening line;
   - on-screen text;
   - first visual action or frame;
   - sound or delivery cue when relevant;
   - bridge into the video body;
   - intended viewer tension and retention hypothesis;
   - claim or evidence dependency;
   - likely failure mode.
6. Reject or revise candidates that create a hook-to-body promise gap, bury the subject, require unsupported proof, rely on vague hype, imitate a source too closely, use deceptive curiosity, or cannot be produced within the stated constraints.
7. Score each surviving candidate from 1 to 5 on audience relevance, immediate clarity, specificity, credible tension, visual interruption, spoken naturalness, platform and format fit, brand fit, evidence support, and alignment with the body and CTA. Explain material deductions. Treat scores as editorial judgments, not measured retention predictions.
8. Select a diverse finalist set rather than several near-duplicates. Unless instructed otherwise, select three finalists and convert each into a timed opening storyboard covering the initial hook, visual beat, body transition, and CTA setup. Label timing as an estimate unless verified against an actual recording.
9. Create a controlled test plan. State the hypothesis for each comparison, the element being varied, what should remain constant, target audience and placement, primary and guardrail metrics, platform-specific metric definitions, minimum decision rule, and possible confounders. Do not invent sample sizes or statistical significance. If traffic volume or baseline variance is unavailable, mark the sample requirement unresolved and explain what data is needed.
10. When historical performance data is supplied, reconcile its date range, audience, placement, spend conditions, creative length, and metric denominators before comparing hooks. Do not compare similarly named metrics across platforms unless their definitions are compatible. Useful measures may include start-to-three-second hold, average watch time, completion rate, rewatch rate, qualified action rate, and negative feedback, but use only metrics available and relevant to the objective.

Safety and approval controls
- Trace factual and performance claims to supplied evidence. Flag expired, ambiguous, or contradictory support.
- Do not fabricate testimonials, user-generated reactions, prices, scarcity, credentials, statistics, guarantees, or before-and-after outcomes.
- Flag hooks involving regulated products, health or financial outcomes, minors, copyrighted media, personal data, platform-policy uncertainty, or material brand risk for qualified human review.
- Avoid exposing private information from briefs, analytics exports, customer records, or media. Refer to sensitive records minimally and recommend redaction where appropriate.
- Require human approval of claims, rights, brand fit, targeting, final assets, publication, and paid distribution. If a safe, evidence-supported version cannot be produced, state the stop condition and provide a lower-risk alternative.

Required output
A. Brief and evidence ledger
- Objective, audience, platform context, body promise, CTA, constraints, supplied facts with source references, assumptions, unknowns, and conflicts.

B. Audience-tension map
- Awareness state, immediate pain or desire, objection, credibility requirement, scroll-context implication, and hook opportunities.

C. Hook territory map
- Territory name, mechanism, strategic rationale, evidence dependency, differentiation from other territories, and principal risk.

D. Candidate hook table
For each uniquely identified candidate include territory, spoken line, on-screen text, first visual, delivery cue, body bridge, retention hypothesis, evidence dependency, production requirement, and likely failure mode.

E. Evaluation and finalist decision
- Ten dimension scores, concise rationale, rejection or revision notes, finalist status, and why the finalist set is meaningfully diverse. Do not present editorial scores as forecast performance.

F. Timed finalist storyboards
- Estimated timing, spoken copy, on-screen text, shot or action, audio cue, body transition, CTA setup, evidence note, and production note for each finalist.

G. Experiment matrix
- Control and variant IDs, isolated variable, hypothesis, constants, audience and placement, primary metric, guardrail metrics, metric definitions, decision rule, required evidence, confounders, and test status. Use “not run” when no execution evidence exists.

H. Verification and approval register
For each check report the expected condition, actual supplied or observed evidence, status as pass, fail, unresolved, or not run, and required owner or action. Check at minimum:
- opening is intelligible without relying on the caption;
- audience and subject become clear within the intended opening window;
- visual, spoken, and on-screen elements reinforce rather than duplicate or contradict one another;
- body content fulfills the hook's promise;
- every factual claim is traceable to acceptable evidence;
- finalists are materially distinct;
- scripts fit duration and production constraints;
- the test isolates a meaningful variable where practical;
- metric definitions and denominators are recorded;
- privacy, rights, policy, legal, brand, and publication approvals remain assigned to humans.

I. Handoff state
- List ready-for-human-review items, blocked items, unresolved decisions, approvals required, evidence still needed, and the smallest safe next action. Never claim that production, testing, approval, or publication occurred unless the conversation contains direct evidence.