For all the marketing collatoral the data industry produces, there’s little that I can read without forcing myself. But when the good stuff comes, it’s like a gust of spring air blowing into a stuffy room. That kind of marketing blew into Datadoodle headquarters Friday morning. VisualCue, maker of visualization software done with “tiles,” won the Datadoodle Occasional Prize for Notable Marketing with “Have Data, Will Travel.”
“This week we’re using data to travel through time!,” it declared. We’ll forgive the overuse of the exclamation marks and give credit for the rarest of elements, imagination. This tastefully designed, lively, and jargon-free creation is credited to the “Visual Crew,” but I’m sure it was hatched by just one person.
The email links to two blog posts about time travel with visualized data. The first asks how long would it take to travel from London to Los Angeles in 1914? That’s answered with a 1914 isochrone map of Earth created by King George V’s cartographer.
“It got us thinking,” the post said. “What would such a map of the world look like today?” That’s exactly the kind of thought that VisualCue wants readers to do, too.
The ending, “Until next time,” breaks the rules. It skips the call to action for something stronger, the reader’s little voice in the head. By the end, that voice might be saying, “Hmm. I wonder what I could do…” And who else to help do it than this vendor? There’s no better call to action than that, and there’s rarely a better marketing pitch than this post.
[…] amazing piece of data history ranks highly not only because it struck a chord with our friend Ted Cuzzillo, but because of how simply and elegantly it presents an entirely new view of the world and gives us […]