There’s a right time for everything, Frank Sinatra taught me that, with a little help from Last.fm. 

Right about now we’re all looking forward to the start of the annual festivities. Yet, as the gift shopping and tree trimming commence, in my house another seasonal celebration has already begun. For every year at the start of December the merriment begins at the moment my Last.fm library finally synchronises with the advent calendar.  

The origin of this annual event goes all the way back to December 2009. Feeling festive, I recall scrobbling Jingle Bells on the much loved music service and enjoying a two-hour Christmas playlist courtesy of Last.fm. Now, anyone familiar with the wonders of Internet radio will know that Last.fm learns what you like. Sure enough, ever since that holiday season, Frank, Bing, Deano and any artist carrying a <Christmas> tag have all been dropping in at inappropriate moments of the year to sing about the immanent Yuletide.  

Now, as those sleigh bells are finally a jingling ring ting tingling, I’m particularly excited that Christmas is coming. Not only because my holiday soundtrack has synced with the season, but also because it seems that I’ll be getting a new job for Christmas! I had asked for a Kindle Fire, but even so, Santa must think I’ve been good this year? So, I’m dreaming of the good things to come with every blog post that I write: the new year will bring new people, new challenges, and new opportunities, and I’m looking forward to meeting them all.  

All of that in good time though. According to Nat King Cole, Christmas time is here. It’s the right time to be thinking of loved ones and the season to be as sentimental as you like. For the last three years, it may have been a little weird hearing Jingle Bells in July, but now I really do wish it could be Christmas every day. To all the lovely friends I’ve made where I am now I’d like to say, you put a great big smile on somebody’s face.  Thank you and Merry Christmas X.

Grammar glamour from Mental Floss.

Last Christmas, I stayed up until way past your bedtime watching one of those list shows. Semicomatose in 10 square metres of the Gatwick Hilton and glued to The 100 Greatest Toys. Jonathan Ross, “Wossy”,doyen of late night telly and king of the speech impediment before Colin Firth, was on the box counting down the English nation’s most fondly remembered games. Mesmerizing. What’s next? What’s going to be number one!?  What’s left in the mini-bar!!? 

 #53. The Supersoaker water pistol. Jonathan Ross introduces the 100 Greatest Toys.

Cheap television or great entertainment: you decide. And you do decide. Whether it’s the Top 20 Soap Opera Weddings [I have no opinion] or the Top 10 Hottest Aliens [Sereleena in Men in Black II and I’ll strike anyone who says otherwise], these shows are usually shot out of a survey of some sort. And that’s the popular point, we all have an opinion to poll on this stuff, so we stay awake and stay tuned. Don’t we? If you remain unmoved by whether it was Cluedo, Play-doh or the yo-yo that bagged the top spot, let’s rollover and turn out the light right now. But, if you’re even mildly curious, read on to discover why we’re all suckers for a good list. 

As a writer for a digital agency, clicks are my call to action. They’re what I do, if I do what I do well. And lists get clicks. As a blogging buddy of mine says: ‘Put “top five” in your title and you’ll get more love for your link.’ A couple of clicks later at Copyblogger [the place to post if you’re a pen for hire], a glance at the articles getting most eyeballs confirms this: 4 Steps to Finding Your Voice, Do You Make These 7 Writing Mistakes? 10 Timeless Tips for Sharpening Your Own Pencil etc. etc. Even professional writers, coo, click and tweet when they see a number it seems. 

So, before the 100 Greatest List Shows of All Time Show goes to air, what’s so irresistible? And happily it transpires that there are 3 Good Reasons for Lists.  

1. POP QUIZ

The Top 10 Reasons You Should Quit Facebook. Wait a second!What Facebook fails annoy you? Telling you what virtual strangers ate for breakfast? Insisting you like everything? Mercilessly stalking your every move online? Suggesting to your ex-wife that she should consider being friends with your new girlfriend? The list goes on and on. But does it? Gizmodo suggests there are ten top peeves, getting you thinking without even asking a question. Taken literally, it’s a pop quiz on social networking sore points, a direct challenge to your knowledge of the digital communication issues of the day.Self-assured netizens may not agree with Gizmodo but will still be interested in how their own opinions compare – which gripes made the cut. We love lists then firstly, because they easily engage us in a topic we know something, if not everything, about. Ok, now you can click. 

2. COUNTING SHEEP

Kindle or iPad? A contemporary consumer dilemma, beyond your ability to resolve? Not so says Digital Trends, explaining in six as-easy-as-the-Kindle-to-read paragraphs why the choice is as simple as 1, 2, 3 (4, 5, 6). When it comes to grown-up complexities like choosing an e-reader, lists pamper to a pre-school predilection for the comfort and safety of our ABCs. 

Another reason we love lists then is psychological. We all feel like children when confronted by the Internet. It’s big. Really big.  And it won’t keep still, so reading it is a scary experience. Every time you think you’ve got it pegged, it pops off another tweet or farts out another post. Lists indulge us in a pleasant fiction that the Internet is finite, not infinite. A mental happy place in which the Internet and the information it hosts can be contained. A fluffy, reassuring notion that the world of the wide web is not random and chaotic but orderly and predictable – the browsing equivalent of counting sheep.

 3. SOFTWARE & SPAGHETTI

So lists flirt with our Internet-enfeebled attention spans, luring us in with the promise of an easy way to absorb information. But it’s not just about appearances; lists do deliver a priority order to attend to. The Best Free Software of 2010 helps us focus on the best freeware out there. With 196 applications, PCMag are testing our peripheral vision a little here, but they go on to cluster the apps into categories, giving us a quick roll call of cheap downloads. And we love a bit of that! 

We all look for ways of managing choice. In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Barry Schwartz was first to point out that we’re wired to hone in on the best and weed out the rest. Malcolm Gladwell’s tasty TED talk on spaghetti sauce, concurred that a typical trip to the store is frustrating; a stack of cans containing 6 varieties will have greater appeal and sell more than a stack of 24. It seems we prefer our pasta sauce to be clustered just like our software. So, if the Internet is a big ole supermarket stacked with too many tins, small wonder we take a list. 

Conclusion? Well, if this was a proper list, we wouldn’t have one: why paraphrase a summary?  Lists often do leave us feeling bit flat as we scratch our heads and wonder, what is the meaning of all this? So instead, to give you a warm, fuzzy feeling as you go, let’s say that lists are one good way of getting attention online. There’ll be others, and writers for will need to find them to keep us clicking. But to leave you really happy, the top spot of the 100 Greatest Toys was taken by Lego.

Okay, stop what you’re doing and ask yourself, why am I so easily distracted? The Internet is heavily mined with interruptions and diversions: browsing, Facebooking, emailing, YouTubing, searching, gaming, Skyping, scrobbling, tweeting, blogging (ahem) – all waiting to explode at any second and scatter our attention to the four corners of the screen.

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions (See full image)

David McCandless, data journalist and information designer at Information is Beautiful, has attempted to impose order on this chaos and precisely chart his own distractibilty (probably while he should have been doing something else). His personal hierarchy of digital distractions gives us an at-a-glance insight into the relative power of Internet interruptions to cause his mind to wander. We see that an eBay bid is bested by an online dating message and zombie flagellation simply can’t compete for his attention with an incoming email linking to a video of frolicking kittens.

Apart from being perfect visual shorthand for my own sorry existence, this infographic speaks eloquently to why infographics are increasing online. And being good “data viz”, it does it in a minimum of words.

As we’re bombarded with information our attention spans start to atrophy and our reading habits change. The American Time Use Survey 2011, found that individuals aged 75 and over averaged 1.1 hours of reading on a Saturday or Sunday and 18 minutes playing games or using a computer for fun. Their grandchildren however, 15 to 19-year olds, read only 6 minutes and spent 1.1 hours playing Call of Duty: Black Ops . Now, there’s a sentence that screams DATA VISUALIZATION! Still with me?

So, as any web designer will tell you, we’re reading less and we’re reading differently. On-screen, we browse, we scan, we look for keywords, we jump about rather than reading from beginning to end. We collectively have the attention span of a five-year-old badly in need of a trip to the bathroom. We look for the path of least resistance, for shortcuts, or as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, puts it:

“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words, but now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” 

Most Popular Infographics. Source: FlowingData

An infographic is worth a 1000 words and today there seem to be 1000s of them. Popular categories of data visualization are appearing with some becoming world famous. Between 2009 and 2011, the number of subscribers to data viz blog Infosthetics almost doubled, while specialist agencies like JESS3 and Killer Infographics have built impressive portfolios. Everywhere infographics are helping us to unpack facts, stats, ideas and quickly give us the skinny.  

How? Well, they can look cool – let’s not forget that! Amy Balliet, co-founder of Killer Infographics didn’t, recently advocating eye-catching visual hooks in a design-led Do’s and Don’ts of Infographic Design. That post quickly led enraged data visualist Nathan Yau, author of FlowingData, to snap back with the Don’ts of Infographic Design – insisting that the data is the story and “the vizualisation process should not misrepresent the story the data has to tell.” Best not get involved.

The Evolution of the Batmobile (See full image)

What are the facts? Infographics are becoming a popular way to actively engage our enfeebled attention spans. They can indulge our non-linear, on-screen reading habits in a graphic story with a message, and with a minimum of words. A bit like a comic book, they stimulate the right and left hemispheres of our brains to work together and make a coherent whole of the words and pictures. That’s how I read it anyway. How do you see it?

Thanks for sticking with me, still working on my PhotoShop skills. Here are those frolicking kittens again.

Bizarre! Gawk at the Guinness World Records 2012 edition and you’d think that freak shows were back in fashion. Roll up, roll up! See Chris “The Duchess” Walton with the world’s longest fingernails (309.8 cm). Marvel at the world’s longest tongue (Chanel Tapper, 9.75 cm). Wonder at how the man with the world’s widest mouth can do that without inverting his head (Francisco “Chiquinho” Joaquim, 17 cm).

Among the biological curiosities on display, we can peek into sword-swallowing side shows, ogle tattooed ladies, and gape at speedy contortionists (fastest time to enter a zipped suitcase, Leslie Tipton, 5.43 seconds ), to name just a few of the oddball achievements that complete the circus lineup. Freakish? Yes. Amazing? Officially.

Guinness World Records has been separating the extraordinary from the ordinary for over fifty years. During that time, it has established itself as an authoritative arbiter of competing claims in size, speed, height, as well as the greatest distance travelled with a pool cue on the chin (Ashrita Furman, 1,668 metres).

Given its focus on unique qualities and achievements, it’s not surprising perhaps that the first Guinness Book of Records was a marketing stunt. Sir Hugh Beaver, MD at Guinness Breweries, recognised that a single source of superlative facts would prove popular with the stout-drinking British and Irish publics and settle a lot of arguments in public bars.

And so it was. Since the first Guinness Book marketing giveaway in 1954, Guinness World Records has gone on to set its own record as the best-selling copyrighted book series of all time (it’s also the most stolen book from US public libraries). Such success proves beyond doubt that we’re all suckers for the strange and wonderful, but also that we love a credible source for fantastic achievements.

Whether you’re the world’s most tattooed man (Lucky Rich, Australia) or a brand of biscuits, being different is what makes you stand out from the crowd. In advertising, it’s called positioning. In his book Creative Mischief, Dave Trott talks about finding the point of difference that will make people remember you. Nobody can recall the 44th president of the USA, Dave says, but everyone knows the first black president is Barak Obama (same dude).

The trouble for a brand claiming to be outstanding is people tend not to believe you. As consumers we’re used to excessive hype and are instantly suspicious of superlative claims by second-class advertising. Take this recent piece of print chutzpah. “Smartphonest”? Says who? Says Samsung? Sorry, not credible. Weasel words are still weasel words even when your tongue’s in your cheek. Where’s the evidence?

Compare that piece of puffery with a genuinely smart way to sell technology. Wieden + Kennedy London, put Nokia’s marketing money where its mouth is when they produced two record-breaking films in 2011: Dot, the world’s smallest stop motion animation, and Gulp the world’s largest stop motion animation. Both films shot on the Nokia N8’s 12 megapixel camera.

Point of differentiation proved. This is creative that understands our love of the extraordinary and speaks to outstanding qualities that are hardwired into the product. It’s a credible claim not superlative bluster. The –est in this advertising is conferred by a credible external source, and by our own eyes. It’s a fact, or as the Guinness World Records would say, this product is “officially amazing”.

You can draw my eye with design, capture my attention with colour, but without words you can’t make me click. “Words lead to action better than visuals”. So says Martin Murphy at adboardingpass  in a pithy little post that pits Wordsmithery against Photoshopery and finds that that the craft of copywriting endures.

I confess, any article that says I’ll still have a job in six months time has my full attention. That said, the point raised is a fair one: if there is a point to advertising it’s to prod us – the consuming public – to do something. Add, Buy, Call, Download, the business imperative in digital advertising is the call to action.

To labour this point, take a look at the screenshot above. What’s with the pretty orange colour? Why the long white space? Where have all the words gone!? The UX pros will instantly recognise a low-friction layout, the motorless among us may spot the Zipcar sharing service, but where’s all this taking us?

A good question, which I’ll now attempt to answer. Scroll down for the solution then come back for a snappy recap on what I’ve learned from this missing words exercise. A call to action should:

1. Encourage

Adults tend to need convincing before we’re told to do something, so sum up the service benefits before the button. Zipcar seems confident we’re already sold, so they’ve simply scribed a soothing little prompt that speaks to how easy this is all going to be.  Let’s “hop on” shall we?

2. Instruct

The active verb in the call to action. For Zipcar, signing up as a member of the service. Some say entice your readers with further carrots at this stage; for example, “Join free”. Some say get the stick out and chivvy people with the word “now”.  I think grownups find the time when we find something worthwhile.

3. Reassure

Have an alternative CTA ready for anyone who’s not convinced yet. The “Find a Zipcar” click is conveniently located (like your Zipcar) where it wins over any remaining doubters. Further reassurances might include listing a file size or language for a download link, or any pertinent fact that answers the question: what comes after the click?

So there you have it, a quick illustration (if that’s the right word) of why words lead to action better than visuals. Thanks to “The Pixel Fixer” Puskala for some nifty Photoshopping. I couldn’t have published a post explaining why he can’t live without me without him.

Quietly Brilliant? What do they mean? Is HTC perhaps secretly outstanding? Are we to think that HTC mobiles are sparklingly average? Or possibly they look glitteringly inconspicuous? What does the antithesis in this HTC tagline tell us about HTC and how does it help to understand how HTC wants to communicate its brand? As I un-knit my eyebrows I wonder, how do you read HTC?

Smartphone advertising is prone to smugness, knowing that it’s got a willing audience for the latest toy. But mobile marketeers mistakenly assume that we’re as fascinated with the product as the industry is fixated with itself. Not so, not for many of us anyway.  What HTC seems to be selling is not a mouthy little monster that’s constantly squawking at us to feed it attention pellets, but a serene little gizmo that hums Mogwai-like, patiently awaiting the next time we wish to be served. HTC is apparently about humility and putting people, not technology first.

This brand positioning pops up in another piece of textbook copywriting for HTCs YOU campaign: “You don’t need to get a phone, you need a phone that gets you.” Another antithesis: a clear contrast of the HTC philosophy with the how the other guy thinks. Brilliant! Mobile technology that’s an expression of you rather than fascinated with itself.  

We hear the voiceover say: “Because in the end, innovation doesn’t really matter, unless it does something that really matters to you”  (at this point, I’m starting to recognise a pattern in how the HTC copywriter works out what words would work, when she’s working with words).  This user-centered design, we’re told, cuts-the-consumer-mustard because your self-effacing little HTC phone only wants to do what you want to do. Bless it!

The idea of empowering people comes through in the copy and in the HTC script font and matching doodles. The pen is a tactile, intuitive tool which we wield with dexterity and ease.  Like all simple tools, the pen is a powerful extension of the hand.  And when things are simple, when we intuitively understand something, “It just makes HTC sense” (note the less-than-humble appropriation of the word sense).  By extending this notion, HTC can make what appears to be an entirely reasonable series of appeals to our common sense, rather than marketing claims for a product; such as, “You shouldn’t have to wait ages for the internet” or “You can hear it in your bag because it automatically rings louder”. Clever, clever! Being intuitive and seeming reasonable then are all part of being Quietly Brilliant. 

So, has the HTC brand totally killed the noise? Well, if you visit www.htc.com you certainly get a lot of clean, white space. Dig a little deeper and HTC doesn’t sound quite so modest.  Claims like: “Want to be entertained like never before?” and “impressive from every angle” don’t seem consistent with the Quietly Brilliant tone of voice. And what about those product names?  If HTC really want us to believe that they are Quietly Brilliant then okay, but from now on the HTC Sensation becomes the HTC Serene, the HTC Incredible becomes the HTC Nice, and the HTC Desire turns into the HTC Don’t-Mind-If-I-Do.

Words and pictures have always worked well together. When I discovered Victim Support’s  Find the Strength campaign recently, I was struck by how successfully it drew me in to the message.  

The campaign takes account of our natural fascination with faces and allows us to read the sad story written there – literally. We’re intrigued to know why the words are presented in this way, and we want to know more. Responding to this unusual reading challenge, we are rewarded when we discover that these are indeed the tell-tale marks of abuse. A campaign that could quite easily have repelled us, instead compels us. Very clever. I’ll be on the lookout for more creative combinations of words and pictures later, I think.

Would you buy cheese, in a Speedo? (Had to think about where to put the comma there:  buying cheese wrapped in a bikini bottom doesn’t bear thinking about, although I have, and now so have you - sorry). No, would you, while wearing swimwear, purchase dairy products? The Feta Man hopes you will.

Aliko, a quiet, sandy cove, offered what you’d expect from a Greek holiday: turquoise sea, golden sand, and enough umbrellas and beds to prevent pale bodies from scorching themselves above or below. Well worth the 12 kilometre ride south from Naxos city for the few sunseekers who made it. With no taverna in sight, you wouldn’t expect to see any food until the evening and yet, as we sweated there by the seashore, feta cheese suddenly arrived for sale.

Aged as well as his wares, the Feta Man was every inch the local product. His weathered face resembled a ripe walnut, his bald head topped with a tied handkerchief to keep off the sun. He plodded along weighed down by a bag of large plastic tubs. As I watched I wondered, what’s on the Feta Man’s mind (apart from the hanky)? What does he think I’m going to do with a litre of cheese in this 40 degree heat?  Eat it all now? Wait for the other ingredients of my salad to arrive? Or pop it in the fridge for later?

Don’t get me wrong, I love feta, but that’s not why I came to the beach. I’d travelled to Aliko that day to relax, to suntan and to paddle. It wasn’t the time or the place for cheese and yes, I’d feel weird buying dairy products in my swimming cossie. It struck me as a half-decent analogy for misunderstanding – or ignoring – why a visitor comes to a digital site. Furnish me with a bed and umbrellas if it helps me achieve what I came for, try to tempt me with a cold bottle of Mythos by all means, but cheese?  

It reminded me of Thomas Giannatsio’s recent post on friction analysis in web design (See Apple vs. Microsoft) at Smashing Magazine. And then it reminded me of dinner.