The premise: getting people’s attention is a key problem of communicating. We can’t demand attention, we must attract it. How? We break a pattern so that people are consciously aware of something different. Another problem: how do we keep attention? Surprise gets our attention. Interest keeps our attention.
Unexpectedness violates basic schema about how we think things work, i.e., how we predict what will happen and how we make decisions. We want to figure out what is counterintuitive about the message (what’s not happening naturally already?) and communicate it in a way that breaks the audience’s guesses then refine their “guessing machines” (to rewrite people’s schemas).
Gimmicks are unexpected, but ultimately useless because they don’t tie back into the core of what we want to convey. We also want to avoid having core messages that are unexpected but generic.
The gap theory essentially suggests that things that create gaps in our knowledge want to be filled. We may not have even been interested, but because there’s a new gap we can create a sense of mystery in our audience. By opening a knowledge gap, it motivates the audience to keep paying attention and see if there’s anything to be discovered.