Vi visual – The Hoffman Agency

My personal soapbox is fast becoming visual storytelling.

This can be a tough one for PR professionals where words have always ruled. Yet, visuals can serve as shortcuts to the emotional touch points of a story. Which explains why 500 million photos are shared on social platforms each day, a number expected to double next year.

But there’s a more fundamental dynamic at work. How do you rise above the noise and get a “listen?”

I came across a chart – yes, it happens to be in visual form – which as much as anything quantifies the noise and the why PR needs to bring visual storytelling into business communications.

global digital info created & shared

Thanks to social media, blogging tools … and the list goes on, all of us recognize that the amount of digital content keeps going up.

Makes perfect sense.

But I didn’t understand the velocity behind this phenomenon until absorbing this Kleiner Perkins chart.

First things first, I needed to get my arms around this measurement of digital storage called a zettabyte.

When I purchased the Agency’s first personal computer back in 1987, it came armed with 20 megabytes of hard disk storage. Today’s desktop computers often come with 500 gigabytes of storage, a gigabyte being 1000 times more than a megabyte.

A terabyte is 1000 times larger than a gigabyte leading us to the infamous exabyte, 1,000,000,000 times larger than gigabyte. Quick aside – the people responsible for the nomenclature should have inserted some levity into the proceedings with a measurement called a “bubbabyte” (think of the possibilities for the NASCAR crowd).

But I digress.

Gargantuan doesn’t begin to describe a zettabyte. Here’s a comparison that framed the context for me. One gigabyte can store roughly 16 hours of music. If your iPod came with a zettabyte of storage, you would be set with 2 billion years (not a typo) of music.

Returning to the KPCB chart, you can see that the amount of newly created digital information will double from 2013 to 2015 to eight zettabytes.

If the customer feels crushed with information today, think about the world in 2015 with twice the amount of digital information raining down.

That’s why visual storytelling demands a core spoke in any communications program.

That’s right.

The basis of visual storytelling can come from words.

I call these “word visuals.” They’re perfect for PR folks who can struggle with bringing a visual dimension to communications. Words as a design technique play to our strength.

These “word visuals” come in four flavors:

Clever words that stand on their own: The words, sometimes in hand-written form, completely carry the day. Little or no design goes into this type of visual storytelling.
Speech cloud from a celebrity: I get a lot of mileage from this technique which is particularly effective for B2B companies where you don’t expect a Conan O’Brien to surface.
Replace the words in an existing visual: Take something that already exists and replace the words with your own.
The words carry a simple image: The Game of Thrones image with our friend Tyrion that kicks off this post offers an example of this approach. The words on top of elementary design give hope of a chuckle.

Clever Words That Stand on Their Own

One of the best examples of this technique comes from Douglas Wray who broke down the essence of social media platforms with the help of a donut.

Again, a third grader could design this visual. The power comes from the cleverness in the words.

The imperfection of the handwriting actually adds to the visual appeal. Check out what happens if we take the same content, but package it with typography:

Using type results in a less interesting visual. There’s a certain beauty to the rawness of handwriting.

Even a few words can create a powerful visual. Business Insider wrote a feature on Ben Silbermann, Pinterest CEO, that included the Venn diagram below.

Just three words with two overlapping circles and voila — a touch of levity has been added.

Speech Cloud with a Celebrity

I noted earlier that I deploy this technique on a regular basis.

When Jolie O’Dell, a journalist at VentureBeat, bitched about PR professionals accompanying executives in press interviews, I served up the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld:

As a second example, a post lamenting the lack of budget information in RFPs riffed off of Jay Leno and his diction during his monologues when he hosted the Tonight Show.

Replace the Words in an Existing Visual

Literally anything with writing on it becomes a candidate for this technique:

Books
Posters
Billboards
Movie posters
Signs
Even a soda can (more on this in a moment)

In a post that examined anecdotes in business storytelling, we found a photo of a person holding a sign at a football game and took the liberty of changing the sign to cheer on the Anecdotes (GIF toggles between the two):

I mentioned this technique can even be applied to a soda can. Playing off New Coke, we inserted Twitter predicting that a new version of the social tool would come to the market.

Again, these types of visuals depend on words to do the heavy lifting.

Equally important, you can create them with minimal design expertise, though mimicking a typeface on a soda does require someone at the controls of Photoshop.

Word visuals at their best can trigger that “what the heck!” moment from the reader.

Side note: In the right hands, crafting words in SlideShare can become a poor man’s video. The post, “The Beauty of Words Can Push into Visual Storytelling” includes an example of this.

Why the PR Profession Must Embrace Visual Storytelling

Category: Vi visual

Why the PR Profession Must Embrace Visual Storytelling