I’m Jess. I write about attention.
For the last several years I’ve worked as a YouTube strategist, mostly on packaging and positioning: the titles, thumbnails and framing that decide whether anyone ever sees the work underneath. Clients have included sports organisations, podcasts, and creators in property, cycling and coaching. The work has generated somewhere in the region of ten million views.
That’s the CV version. The more useful version is that the job was really an ongoing experiment in human behaviour. Every title is a hypothesis about what someone finds interesting. Every thumbnail is a bet on what the eye notices first. Over enough repetitions you stop thinking about the platform and start thinking about the person.
What I found is that almost none of it is new. The principles behind a video that gets clicked are the same ones behind a print ad from 1960, a paperback cover, a newspaper headline, a shop window. Curiosity, contrast, expectation, perceived value. The medium changed. People didn’t.
So that’s what I write about now: viewer psychology, packaging, information gaps, and the behavioural science that explains why some things get attention and most things don’t. I’m interested in the why, not the tactic. Tactics expire. The reasons underneath them don’t.
The book
I’m writing The Oldest Instincts: what platforms industrialised, and what they actually changed. It’s the long version of the argument running through most of the essays. Curiosity, status, belonging, the fear of missing out: none of these were invented by technology companies. They were scaled, measured, and sold back to us at a speed our instincts were never built for.
It’s in early draft. I write about the ideas in it here as I go.
Working together
I take on a small number of strategy engagements each year, mostly with sports organisations and established channels. I’m currently full. If you’d like to know when that changes, the newsletter is where I say so.
