Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Advertising today. A data visualization.


A few weeks ago I was asked to create a video for a client that explained the changing world of marketing and how they've changed along with the world. How the client creates many touchpoints to reach the consumer. The video should be, I was told, about 3 to 4 minutes.

This morning I put the finishing touches on round 15 of the copy--I had to finish it, I was recording the VO. While in the session I discovered that the 3-4 minute video I started with was now 7:43 in length.

Data visualization, as we know, is all the rage. So I went back to my table and did some data visualization on this project. On one axis I plotted the number of revisions from 1 to 15. On the other I plotted the number of words (these include video instructions) from 770, where I started to around 1800, where I wound up.

I call this, "The story of advertising."

2 comments:

Sell! Sell! said...

Oh the humanity.

Time was, the longer you spent on something, the more concise you could make it. "I didn't have time to write a shorter letter" as Mark Twain is reputed to have said.

Sadly not in these heady days of 'amends' and 'builds' though. I shit on the neck of the people who use these horrid terms.

Metaphorically, of course.

bob hoffman said...

The struggle between complicators and simplifiers is eternal.

It takes just one well-placed complicator to undo the good work of a dozen simplifiers.