Infographics

Some are awesome, some stink and some just leave you scratching your head, but all of them make you look. The infographic is utilitarian art combining creativity with data with a message can get your point across in a way that text or graphics alone cannot. You can see them on buses, in magazines and even in political ads. Slowly but surely infographics are making their way into corporate presentations and they should be making their way into your advertising.

A good advertising campaign makes people look. A great advertising campaign makes people stare, and then want more information. The infographic is a great way to engage your audience with something that is both fun to look at and informative. Using an infographic in your presentation or advertising campaign is a good way to get your audience to pay attention and ask questions.

What is an infographic? “Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge.” –Wikipedia. A pie chart is an infographic, albeit a boring one by today’s standards. In fact it’s boring by any standards as I’m sure people in the 1900’s who had to sit through a Rockefeller presentation would have told you. The modern infographic adds a marketing flare to the genre. As I’m a sucker for economic data, I know – lame, the first example displays some economic data.

When most people think of economic data they picture Ben Bernanke sitting in front of congress with some pie charts and stack of paper four feet thick. The infographic above conveys a surprising amount of important business data without being dense or boring. Anyone can look at that graphic and know what’s going on inside if five seconds.

Quite a few of infographics are made from publicly available data sources. The one below was created from data collected in a U.S. study of mail delivery. The data is available online from the USPS. These free sources of data dramatically reduce the cost of producing an informative graphic that you can use for your own purposes.

It’s easy to see how information presented in this manner can be both authoritative and engaging at the same time. The statistics convey a sense of knowledge but the graphics make them less intimidating. We create graphics like this to help companies better understand the information that they have, and to insure that the information is viewed and processed by people who can use that information to make better decisions. Small and medium sized businesses can use infographics to project the kind of authority and engaging manner that potential customers respond to.

Want to know how to use infographics to increase your advertising effectiveness and grow your business? Contact the team at DataFive to get started; we can put amazing infographics within reach.

3 Comments

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