Rovi Archives - Otis Regrets... or not

Boredom banished at DMA 2014

The Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference is happening this week in San Diego, and I’ll shortly get on a plane to join my colleagues. I will be on a panel Tuesday morning October 28, called “Creative Slamdown: How world-class creatives successfully sell strange, obscure, boring or even the most mundane products” put together by estimable designer and freelance creative director Carol Worthington Levy. Panelists Kathy Lemmon and Michelle LaPointe and I will vie to present the most interesting case history of a dry, difficult or tedious assignment which was executed in an interesting and hopefully effective (since this is a direct marketing conference, after all) way.

My centerpiece is a print ad for Rovi’s advertising in the guide (the ads the appear on your TV channel guide while you are looking for a show to watch) aimed at media buyers. Come see how we turned a straightforward and complex pitch/explanation into something memorable, or at least unexpected.

The session is at 11 am, just before the “Hall of Fame” luncheon which is traditionally a barn burner, so this is a great way to get all fired up and ready to go.

The wrong (and right) way to use infographics in your marketing

Infographics seem to be the newest arrow in the art director’s quiver. Why say it with words when you can throw in a clever graphic? I’m fine with this as long as it enhances the communication, but recently I’ve seen some examples in which the visuals actually got in the way.

Here’s a simple infographic from Rovi (they’re my client, but I wasn’t involved in this) which demonstrates several best practices. The stat is about the effective life of different categories of device and it turns out the bigger the screen, the longer it tends to stay around. So the designer created a graph in which time is expressed by the size of the screen and is reinforced by the more precise timeline at the top. It’s memorable and instantly understandable. It pulls one fact out of a longer article which is particularly appropriate for visual expression.

Less good are infographics in which a legend is required to understand what the visual is communicating—in other words, there are design objects that symbolize something and then off to the side there’s a caption that says what they mean. This is a necessary feature with complex charts but an infographic is not supposed to be complex. If you need a legend to make your point, start over.

Still less good are infographics in which numbers are just translated into graphics with color and clever type treatments. This seems to be the most common type of faux infographic. Our friends at eConsultancy shared this classic from Google+ in “How Not to Make an Infographic: Four Examples to Avoid”. (Sorry it’s tiny; click through to the jpg then click on the magnifying glass to blow it up.) There’s nothing in these numbers that could not have been said just as effectively with simple words. The graphics don’t add anything; they’re arbitrary and don’t add the visual revelation we saw in the Rovi example.

Finally, at the bottom of the barrel, we find infographics that are actually incomprehensible. This is the kind of work I’ve seen from a couple of would-be infographics designers who pull out words or numbers that look important, then turn them into graphics and assume they will support the text. But it doesn’t work like that. An infographic has to work on its own as an element of the message.

None of this is news, of course. Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, first published in 1983, has great examples of infographics dating back to the time of Napoleon. I wish some of today’s would-be infographers would read it.

KISS: selling complex products with simple messages

Rovi Bridezilla Ad — Rovi "Bridzilla" Ad in today's Ad Age. Thanks to client Bill Smith and his trusty iPhone.

I’m on a panel at this fall’s DMA called “K.I.S.S – Keys to Copy & Content that Generate Results”. My partners in crime are Dawn Wolfe from Autodesk and Philip Reynolds from pharma agency Palio. The idea is to talk about strategies for translating complex products or services into simple and universal human language that sells.

I’m thinking of using this Rovi promo, which appears in today’s Ad Age, as an example. Rovi does the ads that appear within onscreen television guides and other formats where the viewer is actively involved with a remote or other electronic device; viewers aren’t dozing or distracted so this is an attractive option for media buyers, our target audience. A bit complex so we boiled it down to this idea of the bridezilla who is so enamored of her remote that she can’t put it down even in the wedding chapel.

The antonym of this is the ads you’ll find in any issue of Wired or Fast Company for high-performance automobiles or audiovisual equipment. Those ads typically use visual metaphors of power and performance and expect the reader to be awed, not involved.

The session is happening on October 17, so plenty o’ time to noodle on this. If you have any thoughts or examples on this topic, please send them along!