Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [29]
The commercial was so successful that Corona produced a follow-up. The setting and the positions of the man and woman are the same as in the first version. In this version, the beer bottles are sitting in an ice bucket and are capped. After a still moment, an attractive muscular young man enters the scene from the left and slowly crosses to the right. This time, the woman’s head turns and follows the young man leaving the frame. As she looks off, the seated man reaches into the ice bucket, picks up the bottle closer to the woman, shakes it vigorously, and then replaces it in the bucket. The woman’s head then returns to face front, but her arm reaches out to the ice bucket and takes the bottle closer to the man, leaving the shaken bottle for him. Then her arm reaches out again and extends a bottle opener to the man.
In addition to the classic jealous battle-of-the-sexes triangle, the commercial plays on the theory that women have peripheral vision, whereas men have tunnel vision because of our origins as cave dwellers. The widely held theory (you can find thousands of references on the Web) is also expressed in the book Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps: How We’re Different and What to Do About It, which posits that primitive men, as hunters, had to be narrowly focused on their prey, whereas primitive women, as nurturers, had to have a wider scope of vision for the safety of their children.
Be that as it may, all men and all women share one characteristic regarding their vision: the hair-trigger reflex of the eyes to visual stimuli. Whether in tunnel or peripheral vision, all human eyes react involuntarily to new images. This immutable fact plays a critical role in presentations.
The instant a new graphic appears on a presentation screen, the eyes of every person in every audience immediately dart over to look at it—involuntarily. At this very same moment, most presenters continue speaking. Because the audience’s eyes are more sensitive than their ears, they focus on the graphic and lose the presenter’s words. The audience stops listening.
If instead, the presenter pauses and gives the audience time to absorb what they see, the presenter maintains the audience’s attention.
Combine Corona beer with the classic Coca-Cola slogan, and give your audience the pause that refreshes.
37. The Cable Crawlers: How Television Animates Text
In their drive to feed the insatiable 24/7 monster, cable news channels fill their screens surrounding the central news story with an array of other features displayed in dazzling but sometimes distracting graphics. The visual inclusions (which often become incursions) consist of all or some of these elements: time, weather, sports scores, traffic, stock reports, captions, program promotion, and logos.
One constant element common to all these channels is the crawl, the running banner of news blurbs that streams across the bottom of the screen like the old stock market paper ticker tape. The feature had its electronic origins in the running headlines that wrapped around the historic New York Times building on Times Square. The newspaper has long since moved its offices to a new building, but the crawling headlines have spawned countless clones that live on in many other Times Square buildings that make up the tourist spectacle that is Broadway.
On the cable channels, the crawlers follow the way we read text in Western cultures: They enter from the right, travel across the screen, and disappear on the left. However, CNN changed its format. No longer does their text crawl; instead, it appears as a short single blurb of white text that rolls up into a black slot at the bottom of the screen and then rolls out at the top of the slot, replaced by the next text blurb. Because viewers can better take in an entire blurb in one glance than they can while having to follow the text in constant motion, the difference is easier on the eyes.
See for yourself. Look at the ticker-tape crawls on CNBC, MSNBC, and Fox News, and then look at the CNN style. The latter