Establishing a Cadence Around Marketing Trends
How do you market statistical data on current trends to advertisers when that data has a remarkably short shelf life? Trending data in an advertising capacity is fickle and can frequently only have value for a week or less. For advertisers looking to capitalize on premium ad placement during that time, knowing when those trends are ramping up or cooling off can be a huge boost towards running a successful campaign.
Establishing a Cadence
The ability to captivate an audience quickly and reliably did not exist prior to this engagement in large part due to the complexity of information and turn around time needed to use it effectively. To solve for this, a cadence was established very early on that featured the empowerment of internal 12F resources to lead key steps of the design process, thus building their ownership of the final product while helping disseminate the work load.
A general weekly cadence resembled:
- 12F collects data and exports to Excel
- Internal 12F resource reviews each export, highlighting key cells and flows
- Internal 12F resource collects online articles that support data-set
- Hand off graphs, Excel, URLs, and notes for design
- I break down the data into sections, recreate data as vector art graphs and charts
- Identify imagery that helps support each section and data-set, creating vector iconography and illustration for scalability
- Design draft sent to client for review
- Additional drafts as needed
- Final export to 800 px wide by “X” px long version for scrollable email newsletter and 1024x768px sections for PPT sales decks
Pattern Recognition
Boiling down graphs and spreadsheets into generalized forms with color to emphasize key highs and lows solved for the delivery of complex sets of data without asking the viewer to decipher actual numbers. Furthermore, by taking advantage of the desire for the human eye to be guided to places of high contrast or bright color, and by marrying that contrast/color point to a heavily-stylized icon or illustration, it was possible for sales staff to very easily point at an image without having to read off numbers in order to make calculated points during marketing meetings.
Results
This cadence ran for about a year with great success, culminating in over forty customized newsletters and sales decks. To see the full run of infographics, click here.
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