The Friday Thing #734

Happy New Year and thank you for all the kind notes about edition #733 - it seemed to be useful advice for many.

The Friday Thing #734 is about simplification - a topic on my mind over the last few weeks as I spent my holiday time reading so many things. One of the best things I read was an interview with Peter Carter, the retired Group Vice President of Brand Building and Communications at Procter & Gamble with Contagious - a creative and strategic intelligence service that helps ad agencies and brands deliver more creative, innovative and effective marketing.

I think there is so much that communicators can learn from advertising because the job of advertising is often to deliver a message (or change a perception) in a very quick way that grabs attention - yet doesn't demand a lot of attention. Think of some of the most memorable ads you have seen whether on TV, in print or on billboards. I'd venture that it's the simple, or clever ones that you remember - and that they were accompanied by strong visuals. By their nature, adverts tend to be visual communications and as much as I love words, words take time to digest. Words can have a longer lasting, deeper impact of course and are required for explaining things in depth, but for many communications challenges, I think visuals are the way to go.

A good example is this series of infographics I shared recently on LinkedIn that explain the challenge of reaching net zero carbon emissions. It's a complicated topic with a lot of misperceptions that could be explained in a few thousand words - or a few very well-designed visual stories as Delayed Gratification did here.

Back to the interview with Peter Carter I enjoyed this sentence:

"Whenever there’s something that creates cognitive dissonance with a consumer, all of a sudden, they’re not listening to your message, they’re trying to figure out, ‘How does that jar with my experience?’?"

It's a reminder that simple almost always wins in communications - because anything that creates cognitive dissonance is asking your audience to spend more time working out what you're trying to tell them, versus listening to what you're trying to tell them.

As often happens when I write these things, I think to myself "well that's terribly obvious, Steve" but as I look at the world around me, that clearly isn't the case. Or, to quote Carter again:

"If I take 10 pencils and throw them at you the likelihood of you catching any of them is poor. But if I take one pencil and throw it at you, you’re more likely to catch it, because you have something to focus on. You’ve got to get rid of the confusion and be very decisive about the core of the message that you want to communicate."?

Thus, the lesson this week for myself and fellow communicators is to be simplifiers - with words and visuals. Here is another favourite example of late - by Ian M Mackay.

There is enough complexity in the world right now that asking our audiences to have to work any harder than they really need to in order to understand our message is a disservice to them and our clients. We can help cut through the noise by simplifying our language - and employing smart visual storytelling.

That's all for this week.

Happy Friday

-Steve