Archives - January 2009


A history of visual communication

History of Visual Communication

Artist & designer Elif Ayiter has produced The History of Visual Communication, a website that intends to “walk you through the long and diverse history of a particular aspect of human endeavour: The translation of ideas, stories and concepts that are largely textual and/or word based into a visual format, i.e. visual communication”. It takes you on a journey from “Rocks and Caves”, through “Ideograms” and “The Alphabet”, ending at the era of the “The Computer”.

I’ve posted before on the power of visualisation as a discrete and valuable form of communication in and of itself (see Information Visualisation is a Medium), but I think it’s fascinating to reflect on how potent a form of communication images and pictograms can be, as well as the power of type in communicating the written word. Admittedly it’s primarily the history of western visual communication (I’d love to know more about Japanese visual culture, for example), but still an enlightening journey through the ages.

It’s striking that as you view the evolution from illuminated manuscripts to mass-produced printed books, how visually arresting the manuscripts appear, compared with the endless pages of black and white type in the modern texts.

Making stuff look good shouldn’t just be a nice-to-have or indulgent afterthought – it’s integral to effective communication. If something is visually appealing, it’s easier to process, and is more likely to be engaging. Yes, this is Advertising 101, but this shouldn’t just apply to making copy on ads look pretty, or indeed to website UI testing, or any other form of creative communication – wouldn’t it be great if it applied to communication full stop?

The old adage that a picture tells a thousand words may be much truer than we often realise.

[ via infosthetics ]

January 13, 2009 in Communication | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Magcloud: More fantastic innovation from HP

After the fantastically awesome Tabbloid, enabling you to roll your own PDF magazine from your favourite RSS feeds, those clever chaps at Hewlett Packard Labs have come up with MagCloud. MagCloud allows you to publish your own magazines – you upload a PDF, and HP will take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management etc.

If “the freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press”, MagCloud want to help you to own, write, edit and design your own press. Just as Lulu and Blurb have brought book publishing to the masses, so now are MagCloud trying to do the same for magazine pubishing.

Both products are conspiciously un-HP-branded, but they both do the same thing: allow HP to move from a manufacturer of computers and printers to a digital life provider.

Andrew Losowky has posted some interesting thoughts about the potential for MagCloud. He points out that it may be more of an image-building exercise to reposition HP than a genuine service with its own business plan. But the acquisition of Tabblo and launch of Tabbloid seem to suggest that HP have a wider strategy of becoming a company that delivers personalised content directly to customers.

And the possibilities are tantalising:

How could this technology be used for interesting ends?

Tie-ins, such as with Getty Images, Shelf Made, Issuu, Loot, local press. Turn magazines into paper backups of Flickr, Facebook walls, forums, bookmarked webpages, iCal and other information for a holiday. Use it to make long-dead magazines available again. 1980s copies of The Face. A complete set of Brodovitch’s Harper’s Bazaar. Sure, it’s not going to be exactly the same as the original, but what is? It could be an interesting and potentially exciting niche opportunity for publishers to connect archives with availability, without losing the physical sensation of print

Create associations with Universities, schools, conferences, museums, Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg and other groups where personalised / selected content for individual copies could be a great feature

Get graphic design students to pair up with people who have stories they want to tell editorially, and then create strange, wonderful magazines

Can’t wait to see where MagCloud goes next.

[ thanks to the wonderful Derek Powazek who is the fabulously-titled Chief of Awesome at MagCloud, for the heads-up ]

January 7, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | 1 Comment

2009 – Change We Need

So 2009 – recession, downturn, credit crunch, doom, gloom – you know the drill.

Those big fat advertising budgets are almost certainly going to be slashed (the global ad market is predicted to be the weakest since the 2001 downturn) so it’s likely that change is coming in marketing departments across the globe, as well as in the White House.

The UK media sector will fare the worst of any developed country in 2009 with total advertising spend set to fall by nearly 6% year on year, according to a new report.

The forecast from WPP’s media buying subsidiary Group M makes for grim reading, with UK national newspaper advertising set to be down 12% year on year in 2009, regional titles down 13%, and the business-to-business magazine sector down 14%…

TV advertising will be down 6% year on year, a solid performance in line with the overall downturn in total ad revenue next year, radio ads down 8% and the consumer magazine market down 8.5%.

So yeah, media buyers? Ad agencies? Time to tighten those belts. These changes won’t be so great when the gravy train starts to dry up.

But as a great man said in 2008, change we need.

Brands have relied on the same old same old, tried-and-trusted marketing mix for years, falling back on the backbone of TV, with some outdoor, radio or press chucked in, and maybe a slimline digital budget (of search and banner advertising) to ensure they’ve got a truly ‘multimedia’ schedule. So far so good, no?

The econometric model says it works, doesn’t it? The tracking says it works. The chairman’s wife saw the ad in the break of her favourite ITV drama, and in her weekend supplement (tick). So, it’s a successful formula, right?

Only it’s not working as well as it did. And without the same big fat budgets, the best chance you have of maintaining that all-important share of voice is hoping that everyone else’s budgets have been slashed in line with yours.

Not surprisingly, the likes of the IPA and Thinkbox’s answer to marketing in a recession is to keep on spending. Keep that gravy train running boys.

Lots of brands will keep on doing what they’ve always done, because, well it worked before, so why not now? And their agencies will keep telling them that TV ads work because that’s what they’re in the business of making and buying, and it’s how they make their money. And anyway, telly’s cheaper than it’s been in ages so what have they got to lose? Happy days.

But other brands won’t have the ‘luxury’ of being able to spend their way out of the recession by blowing their budgets on telly. They’ll need to start thinking differently.

Thinking differently is a Good Thing. Brands are going to have to learn to get creative with smaller budgets, and move away from the old gold standards of reach & frequency.

They’ll need to shift their focus away from awareness towards engagement, and replace broadcasting to mass audiences with careful nurturing of brand communities.

Instead of shouting as load as they can, as many times as they can (Ve haf vays of makink you listen!), brands will have to start engaging in conversation with people, and listening to what they have to say – and sorry chaps, this includes the bad stuff as well as the good.

It’s not all going to be plain sailing. Some brands are going to make some almighty cock-ups on the way. We’re going to see some brands marching headlong into an ill-formed social media campaign (note campaign, not strategy) and getting it wrong. Really wrong.

But even that’ll be worthwhile. OK it’ll be pretty hideous at the time, but those brands that do get it wrong will learn how to do it better. And hopefully others will learn by example.

The traditional advertising model is about endless pre-testing, research to make sure it’s watertight, huge investment into a massive broadcast campaign, then post-campaign evaluation to see what worked.

The digital world is in perpetual beta. Try lots of things and see what sticks. Sure, do your research first (please, do your research first!), get to understand the community you’re trying to engage with, and understand how you can add value. But recognise that not everything will work. And that’s OK. Failure is good. Try lots of things and there’ll be some stinkers. But hopefully some gems. Which you’d never have got if you hadn’t have tried in the first place.

Brands that take the bull by the horns and think differently will reap the rewards as they leave the outdated one-way model behind, and move towards a much more rewarding engagement model. Brand that keep their fingers in their ears, and hope that throwing all their money into cheap telly will do the trick, will have a rude awakening when they realise that their lower-spending competitors have stolen a march on them.

This is the change we need.

January 2, 2009 in Communication | Permalink | 3 Comments
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