EQUATIONALLY CHALLENGED?

Admission #1:  We flunked high school calculus.

[So maybe the teacher had an issue with our mouthing off.]

These days, though, it doesn’t pay to get snarky with math or its proponents.  Because in every hour of our work life, numbers come into play.

Colleagues in our sister industries have similar concerns, especially about media measurement.  That stalwart of our parents’ TV black boxes, Nielsen, recently publicized a solution – its new C7 rating would accommodate a week’s worth of views, the total time spent on different platforms (from Netflix to cable to YouTube), and the average audience size.  In partnership with Facebook, it also aims to deliver age and gender demographics for online video viewers.

Digging in deep, the questions still proliferate:

  • Will this account for the folks who (admission #2:  like us) save TiVO- and Roku-recorded content to replay AFTER a week?  Or those who binge-watch specific series and programs way after their debuts?
  • Will this drill down into audience profiles so we know the true value of what’s being sold and bought?
  • Finally (and probably most significant, in our eyes):  Will this C7 analyze attention – how intently people engage with content?

Hey, advertisers aren’t the only ones who yearn to get those kinds of scores.  Those of us practicing change inside companies haven’t yet figured out employee engagement with content – let alone with the corporation.

Or have we?

QUIX PIX = CHAT STAT

It had to happen.

Brands are getting into the emoji business, big time.

These graphics, originally created to add context to text, now live by themselves.  Ford promoted its latest Focus with ‘em.  Unilever’s Dove just rolled out a series of curly-haired faces, customizable by skin tone and hair color.  Domino’s uses its visual as a way to text an order. 

Entrepreneurs are making the most of this emo-design, from a 2013 “translated” edition of Moby Dick housed in the Library of Congress (yeah, called Emoji Dick) to software that suggests emoji as you type.

What’s more, e-statistics are seductive.  As is the psychology behind these hieroglyphics.  Like these:

  • The richer the array of emotions, the happier and healthier the users.
  • People who use emoticons are more popular and influential than those who don’t.
  • Children today recognize corporate logos before they can read.

Now, speaking through pictures is, in short, an almost necessary adjunct to our social media conversations.  Plain language doesn’t cut it anymore.

Perhaps we need to blame Paul Rand who created a rebus of the IBM logo (think:  eye-bee-M).  Or networks like Facebook and Instagram that thrive on communicating in cartoons.  Even Apple which, late last month, announced its first emoji with a cause – against cyber-bullying. 

We have zip against winkies and smileys.  Certainly, as visual communicators, we can’t complain about the explosion of new pictures.  What we miss, really and truly, are the conversations between people, among groups, that rely on faces and sounds and tones and gestures to communicate.