Category Archives: Simplicity

What is Corporate Visual Storytelling?

What is visual storytelling in a corporate environment?

Product photos on a consumer brand Facebook page? An annual report rendered as an infographic? The holy grail viral marketing video shot by the summer intern (or very expensive hipster digital agency)?

Lululemon, the recently embattled yoga wear brand, just hired Laurent Potdevin as their new CEO. The company has struggled recently under some bad press for corporate practices, embarassing statements by leadership and even product recalls. 

Lululemon is hoping that Potdevin, a former leader at Luis Vuitton, Burton snowboards and Toms shoes will turn the corporate fortunes and reputation around. And to introduce him to customers and shareholders, they released a simple, but well-produced video that is pure visual storytelling.

I love it.

Visual storytelling was much of what I helped Edelman raise the bar on during my years at the company. Many of you know that I recently left the PR firm to start my own consultancy. If you would like to learn how I am now working with other organizations to improve their visual communications, drop me a line. 

FacebooktwitterlinkedinFacebooktwitterlinkedin
Categories: Simplicity, Storytelling, Video, Visual Thinking.

Brilliant Minimalist Newspaper Ad

I caught this brilliant minimalist 2 page ad for the new film The Book Thief today in The New York Times today.

The best way to grab attention is to break a pattern. And for a reader of The Times, there is no more extreme a way to do this than to remove essentially all ink from the page.

Love this!

FacebooktwitterlinkedinFacebooktwitterlinkedin
Categories: Design, Simplicity.

Design wisdom from Jacques Pépin

Everyone hopefully knows Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s famous words:

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.


And so I loved Jacques Pépin’s comments in a similar vein from his autobiography which I just finished:


FacebooktwitterlinkedinFacebooktwitterlinkedin
Categories: Simplicity.

What Business Pitches and Sex Have in Common

What do business pitching and sex have in common? Well with certain exceptions, not a whole lot of people get to see you engage in either of them. Really, how do you stack up against the competition in the boardroom? (Or bedroom for that matter.)

You might have seen Facebook’s original ad sales deck from 2004 which is a fascinating archeological find.

But Business Insider seems able to get their hands on VC pitch decks fairly often, and I’m always interested to see how big and not so big names actually pitch and design their slides.

Here’s a recent one from Buffer, a social media startup. What it lacks in design and visual storytelling, it makes up for in simplicity and clarity.

 

And this 18 slide deck from Dwolla netted the founders $16.5 million in startup funds.

 

And finally, take a look at AirBnB’s investor pitch deck. Not bad…except for the incorrectly sized data bubbles…

 

FacebooktwitterlinkedinFacebooktwitterlinkedin
Categories: Pitching, PowerPoint, Presenting Live, Simplicity, Storytelling.

What Your Slides Say About Your Ad Agency

So, I attended the Mirren New Business conference last week. It’s an industry event for creative agencies, and it attracts the top players both as speakers and attendees. There was a lot of talent, a lot of big personalities and a lot of slides. 

And if you think that a creative agency’s slides are an indication of the agency itself, well…here were some highlights…

The Good, The Bad and the Cocky

Jordan Zimmerman is loud, cocky and owns one of the most successful advertising agencies in the world. That’s him below, and that was one of his slides in which he explained how his competitors’ indifference to client bottom lines has allowed him to make millions of dollars and buy expensive homes. You can watch his talk here.

And then there was one of the hot young agencies of the last decade, Droga5. Represented by Chief Creative Office Ted Royer and New Business Director Chris Wollen, Droga5 presented…well, I don’t really remember a thing they talked about. Some case studies and something about solving business problems, but this was one of their slides below. If one wants to equate art and copy with slide design and content, then…I think both Peggy Olsen and Sal ordered one too many martinis at lunch today. And not to pile on, but at one point they actually used the phrase, “This slide is meant to say…”   

But then there was Global Creative Officer Nick Law from powerhouse R/GA. He gave an engaging talk centered on the evolution of advertising to today’s participatory landscape. He warned of falling into the “It’s all about storytelling” meme and reinserted technical systems back into the equation. His slides were incredibly simple, used only shades of red (for some reason, people feel they need to avoid red in presentations) and at the end of the day required next to no design skills to create—just perhaps a design mindset. Below is my favorite which was the centerpiece of his talk.

Each of the above speakers showed their agency’s work in fancy video case studies and commercials. But it was the slides that seemed to tell me the most about the culture and approach of each agency. If I was looking to hire an advertising agency, whose business card would I have collected at the conference based solely on their slides? If I was a CFO, I’d run after Zimmerman. If I was a thoughtful and design-centered CMO, I’d want to talk to R/GA. And Droga5? Um…have they put the coffee and cookies out yet?

FacebooktwitterlinkedinFacebooktwitterlinkedin
Categories: Design, Presenting Live, Simplicity.
visual training presentation