The Weekly COVID Update: Monkey Business
Images tell a story that text just can’t.
I think we all know that images are more powerful than words alone, but how many of us have put this into practice in our work lives. Think about the last memo, e-mail, strategy or point-of-view you wrote. Did it use pictures to make your story, your rationale, your recommendation utterly compelling?
Research shows that we process images far faster than text and, more importantly, more completely than text. We can recognize an image in as little as 13 milliseconds. Which is more than 4600 images a minute.
If we are going to tell the story of the world today purely in text, we might say this:
Our world shares a common social distancing experience.
Politically grounded COVID beliefs are prying open cracks in our society.
In a masked world, our eyes are becoming even more important windows of communication.
Coping with COVID diminishes other issues, like forest fires and climate change.
COVID stress makes it extremely difficult to deal with many personal issues.
We just want it to be normal again.
Blah, blah, blah. Boring. Lots of words, not very persuasive. What if we add photojournalism? Not just pretty pictures, but pictures with a compelling point of view.
Our own work has married photojournalism with qualitative research to bring key ideas dramatically to life:
In case you're wondering where the title of this update “Monkey Business” comes in, it’s in this link here. We didn’t include it directly in the newsletter because (a) it might be construed by some as borderline inappropriate and (b) we were flagged by Mail Chimp for having inappropriate content a few weeks ago and including a picture of monkey’s getting it on might provoke them even more. All in the spirit of photojournalism, of course. Still have no idea what made our newsletter inappropriate. Other than our sense of humour.
Stay safe. It’s a visual world out there.