Our culture is becoming more and more image driven every day. Wordless (or near wordless) communication is the first language of our world.
Dion Chang in conversation with BizRadio’s Grant Jansen
PODCAST | Click HERE to listen
What last week felt like. Here’s to a better one ahead instagr.am/p/V1tN2mPxkT/
— dion chang (@dionchang) February 17, 2013
Why it’s important.
If you want to communicate to any people group, the first thing to do is to learn their language. And the language of the Post Modern world is not made up of words and perfect logical statements. The language is one of images and metaphors. The language of the modern world was one of absolute facts, figures, statements. But two world wars and the bloodiest century in history has taught people to distrust absolutes, and logical arguments.
They are returning at a rapid rate to images and metaphor, after all it wasn’t until Gutenberg that words became so important. Think of the ‘texts’ of Cathedrals, even the few books in the Middle Ages. All images. Think of the thinking and philosophies of the Classical world, all captured in metaphors, story, myths and images.
Our brains think in pictures. Our minds are programmed to handle metaphor and narrative. What is a story other than a series of pictures?
And with image uploading reaching record highs, Instagram uploaded over 200 pictures per second during this year’s Superbowl final in the US, and that is just pictures of the Superbowl, not counting all the pictures of cats and lattes, those pushes it up to 40 million photos per day, image based communication and marketing is becoming more important than ever.
Another reason why this is happening, is that there are simply more cameras around. Most of us have a phone with a camera function. To simply snap a picture of a product rather than type a text message is not unusual.
With all the information to get through, we have witnessed the rebirth of the info-graphic, in his top TED talk… David McCandless, shows how masses of data can be beautifully and, more importantly, more clearly communicated in an info-graphic. informationisbeautiful.net
What’s the Butterfly Effect
Images connect us emotionally to a person, story or brand. If you can’t get them to ‘feel’ your brand. They won’t buy it.
We simply just have a lot of information to get through, we tend to skim and scan more that we used to. And a picture is worth…
We have already returned to the ancient scroll, most of us scroll every day. The return is now to the pictogram, the hieroglyph. If you cannot use words, how would you tell the story of your brand, with even text messages becoming more and more visual, people will send just 😉 or a ? rather than type out the emotion, more evolved emotiocons readily available of course.
In a world that is increasingly multi cultural, telling stories in images bridges the gap. Learning the language and do and don’t of image based marketing and storytelling will be the new language course.
The Pioneers and Global Hotspots
Wordless commercials started to appear more and more regularly during Superbowl final the last couple of years. These ad slots are sought after, expensive and trend setting. See this ad from FIAT, that aired at the Superbowl in 2012.
This one, from Budweiser, aired 3 Feb 2013, is another wordless narrative:
Just last year Starbucks followed the #starbucks hashtag and posted user generated pictures from Instagram onto their own web: api-highlights-moby-starbucks-deftones
Pinterest have been on the image based marketing trip for a while, simply when a business posts its images on the pin-board and it gets re-pinned and re-pinned, the original link goes with it. Directing the customer back to the business’ website. Read more here: Pinterest Marketing
Author: Pierre du Plessis
As an example of the ‘hyper visual world’ observation, Dion shares his recent Instagram moment, which was a picture of the Oscar Pistorius billboard being taken down and how it was picked up by international media at the time the athlete was taken into custody for allegedly murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.
Join Grant Jansen (@Kapetonian) every weekday morning from 10 to noon for the Daily Biz on Biz Radio. Stay in touch with Grant at @Biz_Radio on twitter, Biz_radio on Skype and [email protected] to mail him.
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