4 posts tagged Dave Armano

Dave Armano brought this to my attention this AM:

OK, big deal right? Just another poster for Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland.

Right.

But it, as the NYTimes wrote, it “occupies most of the paper’s cover page, superimposed over what looks like the usual, sober front page.  Above him is the “lost Angeles Times” banner, and bracketing his face are actual, recent articles.”

Well, obviously, we know what the goal of this was - mass reach, impact and awareness. But at what cost?

More and more frequently advertisers are placing their messages into vehicles that are meant to look like objective, 3rd party content.  Granted, in this case, a little obvious that it is not, but for the most part, it is becoming incredibly difficult for a consumer to separate out paid content from objective editorial.

And as a consumer, that infuriates me.  Usually, I can easily differentiate between paid content and editorial content, but there have been situations where, due to some good copywriting, I somehow clicked, typed in a URL or read the “article”.  The second I realized it was paid content - an ad - I immediately abandoned what I was doing - angry at the brand for misrepresenting itself.  And permanently removing it from my consideration set.

The Alice In Wonderland cover ad was not particularly misleading, perhaps more annoying than anything else.  The LA Times has done worse - they ran a front page ad for the TV series Southland formatted as a real article - and received quite a bit of backlash.

Kudos to the editors at the LA Times for pushing NOT to run the Alice ad.  At least they tried.  And while I understand why the business execs made the decision (revenue) perhaps their time would be better spent trying to figure out how to update their print model in a world of digital consumption.

“Tricking” consumers to get them to engage isn’t going to perform as well long-term as having an open and transparent dialogue.

My love of information graphics is no secret. When faced with thousands of graphs and complicated spreadsheets, my little head just wants to explode because it often takes hours to sort out unnecessary data and get to the good stuff that is relevant. I have seen PowerPoint decks with over 200 slides, hundreds of charts and graphs and, ultimately, 2 key learnings from all of it (I can hear Dave Armano having a meltdown now - well, Dave, you should try sitting through those meetings - oh so fun).

SERIOUSLY.

In come information graphics.

Some of you may ask - but what is this? It’s simply a visual representation of data.

When designed correctly, information graphics take multiple (and often complex) data sets and turn them into one concise and easy to absorb visual. Heaven. Like a picture book for grown-ups.

One of my top 5 infographics is a visualization of the Google newsmap universe. Colors designate subject matter, box size indicates impact of story.  Simple filters allow users to easily customize their view by location and topic.  With a quick glance, I can see the hottest technology news story in Argentina. Or the biggest entertainment news in Spain.  Without having to over-process content.

If we became more skilled at creating infographics, I suspect our overall understanding of data results would be processed and absorbed far faster than rows upon rows of numbers. Call me crazy, but a picture can speak a thousand words (data-sets).

Check out more best practices at instantshift.com and webdesignreport.com.