Death on a whiteboard

If you want to get something done, I've learned you don't write it on a whiteboard.

Over the years, I've had a number of clients with whiteboards mounted on the walls of their offices. Without exception, not much changed from one week to the next. Any scribbles were usually just that – scribbles. One client had even gone to the trouble of marking out a section for his kids to doodle, and I was always intrigued by the idea of holding serious business discussions as Laura woz 'ere would catch my eye across the room.

When it comes to workshops, whiteboards take centre stage. However, it usually doesn't take too long before they start to interrupt rather than illuminate the discussion. There's rarely any pens to hand that work for more than four words, after a couple of lines you start to realise that you're writing on a ridiculous slant that makes everything trail off into the bottom right hand corner, and it's only once you've riddled the board with a sheen of half-baked ideas that you discover you've been writing in permanent ink.

Technology doesn't make things any easier. If you have a whiteboard from which you can make prints, one of three things usually happens: there's no paper, you write on the one screen that doesn't print, or you fail to use the only colour that reproduces with any degree of legibility. And if you're lucky enough to have one of those whiteboards that saves everything to a central hard drive, you can be certain that it will be saved to the hard drive never to be seen again.

Unfortunately – and in spite of my better judgement and past experiences – I recently learned this the hard way.

Our studio is now the proud owner of a brand new, shimmering whiteboard. A breeding ground for cartoons and caricatures, it produces little in the way of insight or efficiency. To make matters worse, it has been hung (professionally, I might add) at the perfect height for anyone below 5 feet tall. Now and then, I stare longingly at the whiteboard, in the desperate hope that it will spring into life, but I'm also slightly worried that it will instead crash to the floor, pinning any nearby designers to the ground.

But then, it could always be worse. We could be having one of those brainstorms where there's no such thing as a bad idea – like buying a whiteboard.

6 weeks later

Earlier in the year, a good friend pointed me in the direction of what is both a very curious and very productive social experiment in branding.

It's called 6 Weeks, and it's a project by a chap called Paul McCrudden.

Paul took it upon himself to measure the amount of time he spent with brands over a 6-week period (on his blog and using Daytum). And then – and this is the best bit – sent each of those businesses an invoice for his time.

,

£531.25 to Transport For London for time spent on the Tube.

£17 to the Royal Mail.

£97.75 to Sainsbury's.

And a host of others, including £25.50 to his local café, the Squat & Gobble. Who actually replied with the gift of a voucher.

As did Cranberry, EAT, Little Chef, Pizza Express and Pret A Manger with a variety of offers – and even actual payments.

Personally, this is my favourite branding idea of the year.

It prods and pokes the relationships that brands build with their consumers. It questions the value of those relationships. And it asks brands to recognise the value of not only their portfolio of products but also their share of consumers.

Paul's also gone to the trouble of publishing this summary below so that you can get the full story.

From Paul's perspective, the opportunity lies with better understanding PR and, in particular, social media. But I actually think there are bigger issues here that are fundamental to the role of branding in the 21st century.

But hey, it was his brilliant idea, not mine, so what do I know? All I need to do is get my invoice in the post.

Some days are better than others

It's December 5.

Day 339.

Only 26 to go.

But I think it's safe to say that today was far and away the worst day of 2009. And my birthday to boot.

I won't go into the details, but the only way I can bring myself to write a blog post this week is by reminding myself that it could always be worse. So here goes with the top 3 worst moments of my career so far – the worst pitch, the worst presentation, and the worst client lunch.

The worst pitch was also on my birthday. It was to Firepower, and then CEO John Finnin. All I can say is we lost the pitch, investors lost millions of dollars, the CEO's now in jail for sexually abusing young boys, and the chairman's about to follow him for fraud or some similar white collar crime. As it turns out, it seems we got off lightly.

The worst presentation was to a university vice-chancellor who decided to pull out a bottle of correction fluid halfway through the presentation. It turned out she wanted to make her own changes to the design recommendation. You know the sort of thing, a little off the side here and there.

The worst client lunch happened when one of my guests fainted at the table. She was out stone cold for a minute or two while we tried desperately to work out if she was still breathing. It was a real shock to say the least.

So that's it. Things can only get better, and they do say that tomorrow is another day – and what better way to get the ball rolling than with a Sunday lunchtime teleconference with the team in Cincinnati. Go the Bengals!

Data is not dull, you are

It was Raymond Loewy, the renowned industrial designer, who once said "the most beautiful curve is a rising sales graph". And he may well have been right.

However, the information we communicate is not always quite so easy on the eye, let alone anything that comes close to being "beautiful". To my mind, sensible spreadsheets and po-faced pie charts only exacerbate mankind's weakness for convenience over character.

But the real poster boy for plain boring must be PowerPoint.

A few years ago, I discovered this PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address. An exercise in demonstrating just how far PowerPoint can reduce one of the most inspiring speeches of all time to a rubble of drab and dreary slides. And please don't get me started on clip art.

That said, the other extreme does exist in the form of David Byrne's creative use of PowerPoint as an artistic medium. However, it's not quite the same as using PowerPoint to share basic information, as most of us do on a day-to-day basis. And herein lies the real challenge.

Now I should say I’m not advocating that everyone rush off to design school (although a basic eye for aesthetics might be nice). But what is important is that we all take a moment to consider the poor people who have to wade through all this information that we feel compelled to emit. Because we have to remember that the only reason we ever communicate is to create a response – in the words of one of my favourite writers, the late, great F. Scott Fitzgerald, “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say".

If you communicate because you feel a purely self-motivated, almost evangelical calling to communicate, then go ahead and write 100 PowerPoint slides in 8 point. And help yourself to as much clip art as you can possibly find. In fact, go crazy with the clip art.

But if you choose not to follow this path – and trust me, it is a choice – then you need to think more carefully. Not simply about what you want to say, but more about how you want to say it so that your audience think or feel something in response.

And that’s why I love any software, applications, widgets and websites designed to show information in surprising and delightful ways.

My current favourites are Daytum and Information Is Beautiful, where some of the most mundane data gets presented in some of the most creative and thought-provoking ways. All of sudden, you see how data can take on the character of the story that you want to tell, not simply report the facts and figures in a statistical but ultimately superficial way.

Both take their inspiration from designing information in a way that can help us understand the world around us. David McCandless, who started Information Is Beautiful, describes himself as a visual and data journalist "with a passion for visualising information – facts, data, ideas, subjects, issues, statistics, questions – all with a minimum of words". And with an equally fervent hatred of pie charts.

To show you what I mean, here's the "Billion Dollar Gram" by Information Is Beautiful, which highlights the relative amounts of money spent on all sorts of different bits and pieces.

When you view data through a creative lens, McCandless describes how it can reveal hidden patterns, insights and stories, which strikes a similar note to how Nicholas Felton, Daytum's founder, describes his start. He began by producing yearly tabulations of his life which he called Annual Reports, "a collection of charts and graphs that concentrate the year into statistical chunks and illuminate his life in a wry but rigorous manner", and he then sourced the help of Ryan Case to evolve his basic methodology into a platform for self-expression.

This is the front cover of the 2008 Feltron Annual Report, the early springboard for Daytum.

There are probably more examples out there, but these both brilliantly exemplify not only the statistical value of communicating information in such an engaging way, but also the aesthetic advantage of their approach, one that elevates the end result in every way.

As it happens, Sydney design studio Toko also took inspiration from your typical set of statistics for their design of the annual report for "The Hague in facts and figures". To the point that they transformed the various charts and graphs that you would associate with your average annual report into visuals that could be read either as statistically-accurate graphs or stunning works of art.

What's more, some of the graphs shown above were also produced as canvases and displayed within their work environments. Yes, real art on real canvas.

As I wrote earlier, communication is only ever about creating a response, not simply tossing information into the ether while you sit back and wait for something – anything! – to happen. It really does come down to that age-old adage, "The more you put in, the more you get out". Which basically means that if you take a boring approach to the way you communicate, you will be rewarded with nothing more than a bored audience.

Data doesn't have to be dull. So nor do you.

Lessons from the boardroom

I thought I'd take a slightly more leisurely stroll through the world of branding today, given that the last two posts have been a little on the serious side.

Over the years, I've had to make all sorts of presentations. Some have gone better than others, but three things have always stood me in good stead in the boardroom when it comes to putting on a show – or, conversely, settling a showdown.

Firstly, I've learned how to make sense of more boardroom audio–visual systems than most. This might not sound like much, but it can make a world of difference when you've got an anxious CEO and his executives hunched over the table in impatient anticipation.

While most falter when faced with the seething snake pit of cords and cables that lurk beneath the boardroom table, I jump straight in with all the fearless instinct of an intrepid Indiana Jones – albeit one with a lanyard swinging from my neck rather than a whip crack from my hand. Generally, it's a test of whether I can get the presentation on screen before the IT chap arrives. On those occasions when the client is organised enough to have arranged the IT chap to meet me on arrival, I always feel a little disappointed – perhaps even cheated of the challenge.

Secondly, if you can't present your 2-hour presentation in 5 minutes (including questions), then I would say you're underprepared.

I've encountered the "5–minute flick" over the past few years far too many times to count, but oddly enough I have noticed that there tends to be an inverse relationship between the scale of the project and the typical amount of time you get with key decision–makers. Often, the more they're paying you, the less they want to see you.

Thirdly, it sometimes sounds so much better if you can find someone else to say it for you. But I don't mean your wife or your best mate, I mean Winston Churchill or Gary Hamel.

The right quote can give a presentation not only a lift but also some leverage – to the point that it can instantaneously fix your message firmly at the front of your audience's minds. It's not only memorable, it's also motivating, so I would suggest that you always have a spare quote or two up your sleeve (as snake oil salesman as that unfortunately sounds).

Anyway, I'm not sure if these are lessons so much as observations, but there you have it.

Oh, and by the way..."the older you grow, the more you become".

Pumping up the tyres of the recession

People typically reveal themselves when under pressure.

The recession is putting a good many businesses under a fair amount of pressure. I, for one, think that can only be a good thing, but it is enlightening to see how differently the reactions range.

Take financial institutions.

Most have simply screeched to a halt, blinded in the headlights of the oncoming issues. This generation of bankers haven’t really had to make tough calls before about their futures before because all roads seemed to be paved with gold and it was simply a question of degrees of success. And when it came to their brands, as long as the business card was embossed with gold leaf on a weighty stock, none of them really cared. If they happen to have pulled over carefully to the side of the road, they might be able to avoid scrutiny, but if they find themselves at a busy crossroads, it’s likely they’ll get caught in the pile-up.

Many have taken a more dogmatic view. Hunkering down in the comfort of their most recent bonus, they are simply hoping that it will all go away before they have to change their habits. The machine is still full steam ahead, but no one is particularly keen to take the wheel, or even look over the dashboard. And if they do crash, there is a clear belief that the combination of size and sheer momentum will carry their brand through to the other side with only some minor abrasions and maybe a slow puncture.

There are a few that have decided to trade their vehicle, as it were, for a slightly different model. Maybe it’s a different colour, or maybe it’s a more substantial change like smaller engine capacity or lighter fuel consumption. Whatever the difference, they’re trying valiantly to tune their brand to the times without necessarily going so far as to forego it altogether for a completely different vehicle. It’s a sensible strategy, at least for the fact that it’s a little more considered.

And finally, they’re a small number that have decided that to put their foot down and either ram their competitors off the road or car­–jack them at the next set of lights. It’s not pretty, but it’s basic marketing instinct for those who want their brand to prosper not just survive.

But it’s not just financial institutions that find themselves driving their brand manually when they have only ever cruised along in automatic. The recession has hit everyone in different ways. From FMCG to fashion, cars to airline carriers.

That said, a recession doesn’t simply have to be about going backwards, quite literally receding. There are as many advantages as there are disadvantages to be gained by choosing to go forward, even if it may require a small sideways step to get you started.

You might need a push from some friends, maybe a jump–start from an unexpected passer–by, or there might even be a free tank of fuel in a competitor’s abandoned brand.

Anyway, I promise that’s the first and last time I’ll write about the recession. I find them incredibly tedious affairs as everyone (1) gets incredibly anxious at the slightest twinge, and then (2) feels the need to talk about the importance of investing in a downturn with the same fervent passion as a man who has just discovered crack cocaine and is absolutely certain that no one will ever get this high again.

That’s it. No more recession talk. I promise. (Except for a presentation to a client next week – their idea, not mine.)